Thesis problem
Title: Service Oriented Enterprise Architecture (SOEA)
Supporting the business has always been the purpose of IT. However, in an evermore competitive world the ability to change has become more important than ever. Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) has often been proclaimed to be the “silver bullet” that can make your IT flexible and support the desired agility of the business. The following quote illustrates how serious this problem is:
“A recent survey of Fortune 500 companies indicated that over 80% had altered their business model in a given two-year period. Two thirds of these - roughly half of the total respondents - claimed that this business change had been constrained by inflexible IT. In a survey by IBM Business Consulting Services, 90% of CEOs expect to transform their enterprise to become more responsive, particularly to customer demand, within the next five years.” [CBDI]
SOA is the natural evolution in software development, enabling a higher level of abstraction, which has made it easier to lift IT to a management level. This higher level of abstraction has lead to conflicting areas between Enterprise Architecture (EA) and SOA. A conflict that need to be approached with caution. But, if solving this conflict it is my claim that SOA and EA will form a synergy enabling the harvesting of the promised effects of both SOA and EA.
Before a conflict can be solved it must be known, and in order to resolve the conflict a common ground must be identified. The purpose of this thesis is to set the first step in this direction by:
- Describing the evolution of SOA as a concept.
- Identify, on a conceptual level, the aspects where SOA and EA operate on common levels of abstraction.
- Elaborate on the conceptual aspects, using operational aspects commonly used by both SOA and EA.
- Discuss the next step of SOA and EA.
Problem summary: Does SOA and EA have a spurious correlation , or is there something causal between the two?