Service-Oriented Architecture Adoption: A Normative Decision Model for Timing and Approach

Literature Review

The technology of interest in this research is a service-oriented IT architecture. The researchers chose this particular technology to develop a decision-making framework for because many experts had anticipated SOA to be widespread in industry by today, but this has yet to occur. For example, the widely cited Gartner 2008 hype cycle for emerging technologies (Fenn et al., 2008) expected Web services to be viewed as fairly mature and reaching the “plateau of productivity,” with SOA reaching the “slope of enlightenment”. Despite these predictions and the wide attention that SOA has received in the trade press, best practices for SOA are not commonplace (Gootzit et al., 2008). It is true that SOA adoption overall is increasing, but it is occurring at a pace much slower than initially anticipated (Sholler, 2008). Part of this hesitance might be attributed to the lack of formal best practices identified in the academic literature for IT managers to follow.