Nils Joachim

The influence of SOA governance mechanisms on IT flexibility and service reuse

While many firms have introduced SOA, only one in five have achieved anticipated benefits such as increased IT flexibility or reuse. Industry analysts assume that a lack of SOA governance is the main reason why SOA projects fail. Addressing the substantial research gap on SOA governance this paper theoretically and empirically investigates which SOA governance mechanisms are needed to achieve the benefits of SOA, such as increasing IT flexibility and reusing services. The proposed theoretical SOA governance model is evaluated using data from 81 SOA-using organizations. Overall, the results confirm the relevance of a variety of SOA governance mechanisms (structures, processes, and employees/relations), but at the same time, that IT infrastructure flexibility and service reuse are influenced by different mechanisms. Key governance mechanisms that show a strong effect on infrastructure flexibility are using standards, service management processes, educating employees, and IT/business communication while reuse can only be increased through service management, standards and qualification. Contrary to expectations, implementing new, dedicated decision-making bodies for SOA hampers organizations in achieving higher degrees of IT flexibility and reuse, and a firm is better off using existing IT decision-making bodies.

The joint impact of service-oriented architectures and business process management on business process quality: an empirical evaluation and comparison

What is the interplay between business process management (BPM) and service-oriented architecture (SOA) in achieving high business process quality? In this paper, we empirically investigate the impact of both SOA and BPM on business process quality in terms of straight-through processing, business-to-business integration, quality control, as well as standardization and consolidation of business processes. For the empirical evaluation of our model, we use the data of 157 German service firms. The results show that the SOA paradigm has still received rather low adoption rates in the industry. However, SOA, BPM, and related information technologies have a direct positive impact on business process quality and the analysis provides evidence for the complementarities of BPM and SOA since interaction effects between them have an additional significant impact on business process quality. Consequently, firms having adopted SOA can more effectively apply BPM.

What Are Important Governance and Management Mechanisms to Achieve IT Flexibility in Service-Oriented Architectures (SOA)?: An Empirical Exploration

Recent research results and practitioner experience both posit that Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) governance is critical to successfully implement and utilize SOA. We investigate the impact of different SOA governance and management mechanisms (structures, processes, and employees) for leveraging SOAs potential to increase an organizations IT infrastructure flexibility. The results based on data from 73 SOA using organizations reveal - a negative impact of implementing new decision-making bodies on 2 dimensions of IT flexibility (IT modularity and integration) - a positive impact of the SOA management processes service management and service development on 2 dimensions of IT flexibility (modularity and integration of IT infrastructure) - a positive impact of business units collaboratively identifying jointly utilizable services on modularity - and a particularly strong impact of standards, and also of employee qualification, on all dimensions of IT infrastructure flexibility.

Proposing the Relationship between IT Business Alignment and the Business Value of Service-Oriented Architectures in Financial Firms

What is the business value of Service-Oriented Architectures (SOA) and how can we achieve it? This paper represents a conceptual piece of research which focuses on the impact of IT Business Alignment (ITBA) on the successful implementation of SOA, in terms of its business value. The contribution of this model is predominant in proposing a threefold effect of ITBA on achieving a successful implementation of SOA through the specific strategic needs defined by a particular firm in a specific industry, i.e., the banking industry. As a result, we show that the business strategy moderates the impact of SOA’s general potentials on its actual business value and claim that this relationship is further moderated by ITBA, which must be thoroughly considered by practitioners deciding on introducing SOA in their firm.

The Role of SOA for BPO Intention – Proposing a Research Model

How does the availability of an Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) within a firm affect the potential of and intention for outsourcing business activities? Since one of the promises of SOA is to modularize the IT representation of business processes, it should facilitate business process outsourcing (BPO) in terms of buying the provision of single business functionalities. In this paper, we develop a conceptual research model that theorizes the relationship between SOA and BPO intention.