Building the Business Case for SOA: A Study of the Business Drivers for Technology Infrastructure Supporting Financial Service Institutions

Abstract

Financial service institutions are pursuing organizational agility in the face of an increasingly competitive marketplace, and are consequently looking infrastructure technologies that enable process and infrastructure agility. Service-oriented computing (SOC) appears to provide flexibility and agility, not just in systems development but also in business process management. This paper empirically examines the decision to adopt SOC as an enterprise strategy across fifteen firms, and investigates the business drivers that influence the enterprise adoption of SOA. In doing so, this paper adds crucial empirical evidence to the formal academic literature about the business case for SOA as an enterprise strategy, and lays the groundwork for future work on SOA alignment with business strategy.