Three research essays on business-driven strategies for Service-Oriented Architecture implementation

This research examines the impact of alternative strategies for Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) adoption and implementation under various conditions, and seeks to provide guidance for decision makers. It employs a systems dynamics approach to understand and explicate the process. The model and accompanying simulation can serve as a practical decision support system for the strategic decisions involving implementing SOA.;Essay 1: IT Staffing Strategy for SOA. Managing information technology (IT) human resources and skills presents a challenging task for executives. When implementing projects involving SOA, the initial planning and implementation of the underlying architecture entails higher costs and slower delivery of initial SOA applications. Hence, the right choices for IT human resource management for SOA projects are increasingly considered to be critical for successful SOA implementation. The complexity associated with the fluctuating demand for IT skills, coupled with the need for highly-skilled senior architects and professional developers in SOA projects, as well as inevitable delays in skill acquisition, makes this a challenging task. This essay examines the impact of alternative staffing strategies under various environmental conditions, and provides guidance for staffing decisions for SOA projects, using a systems dynamics approach.;Essay 2: Adoption Strategy for SOA. The emergence of SOA as an agility-enhancing technology raises the question of how firms can best make an informed decision about adopting the innovative information technologies. The complexity and the dynamic interactions among many antecedent factors make it difficult to determine when to adopt SOA. These factors include the unique benefits of SOA, the costs and risks of implementing SOA, environmental characteristics of the industry, and organizational factors that necessitate the introduction of new information systems. This essay seeks to model this phenomenon using a systems dynamics approach, examine the impact of potential adoption strategies surrounding SOA under changing conditions, and provide guidance for managers making SOA adoption decisions.;Essay 3: Shaping the Business Value of SOA. With firms facing intense rivalry, globalization, and time-to-market pressures, the need for organizational and Information Systems (IS) agility assumed greater importance. However, despite the emergence of SOA as a prominent agility-enhancing technology, the fundamental question of how SOA can shape a firm's competitive advantage over times and how firms can derive business value from SOA initiatives has not been adequately addressed. The dynamic interaction among environmental factors, IT-Business alignment, and organizational and IS agility makes the process of deriving business value relatively complex. This essay models this value shaping process using a systems dynamics approach, and examines the impact of implementing SOA under changing conditions with a view to providing guidance for managerial decisions.