Evaluating use of ITIL to manage SOA applications in operations environments.

M. Tech. Professional Practice in Information Technology. Tshwane University of Technology, 2011.Service Oriented Architecture is touted to be the architecture that can provide organisations with the ability to respond more quickly to changes in their business environments than otherwise. This is because Service Oriented Architecture design principles encourage applications to be designed for dynamic reuse, communication and integration with other applications thereby reducing the time-to-market of applications that support new or changed business processes. One of the ways of using Service Oriented Architecture principles when developing applications is by using web-services. The web-services used in composing or building Service Oriented Architecture applications may be developed by different teams using different programming languages, may reside in geographically dispersed areas and be connected and communicate by using a variety of communications infrastructure. As a result, Service Oriented Architecture applications often have a dynamic, heterogeneous and distributed architecture. This architecture poses a difficult challenge with resolution of issues experienced with Service Oriented Architecture applications in operations environments. In this research, literature review is conducted to firstly, investigate challenges of Service Oriented Architecture applications in operations environments. Secondly, root-causes of these challenges are identified. Then a framework for management of challenges of Service Oriented Architecture applications in operations environments is developed based on the identified challenges and their root-causes. Elements of this framework are then compared with Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) processes to evaluate the extent to which Information Technology Infrastructure Library can be used to manage Service Oriented Architecture applications in operations environments