A CASE STUDY OF SERVICE ORIENTED ARCHITECTURE IMPLEMENTATION AND GOVERNANCE

Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) has received increased attention from practitioners and academicians. SOA allows companies to reuse available components/services and build flexible systems that implement changing business processes quickly. However, SOA is not well understood and few studies have addressed its concepts and implementation. The purpose of this study is to discuss the implementation and governance issues of SOA based on a detailed case study at a large financial services company. The results show that SOA can transform an organization’s information technology infrastructure and reshape project deliverables. However, developing an SOA infrastructure can take multiple iterations and years to develop. The results also demonstrate the importance of understanding not just technology, but also business value and processes when implementing SOA