Service-Oriented Architecture Adoption Patterns

As many organizations are recognizing that their current IT architecture does not provide the business with the needed agility to compete in an ever faster changing business environment, many CIOs and enterprise architects are seeking to improve their overall IT architecture by moving towards a service-oriented architecture (SOA). While the technology around SOA is maturing, the adoption of a service-oriented IT paradigm and its organizational consequences are not without challenges. Organizations start their SOA initiatives from diverse baselines, are at different stages in the process, and take varying approaches to accomplish the expected IT and business goals. This research has the objective to identify adoption patterns of SOA and paths of SOA adoption observed in a field study of eight organizations with SOA initiatives.