Stakeholder involvement in SOA : analyzing service identification as co-design

Sammanfattning: The need for adapting rapidly to IT and business changes, reducing costs, delivering improved functionality of services and better integration push organizations towards service oriented architecture (SOA) adaption. Delivering SOA requires building systems at the business level, not just at the IT level. Delivery of services needs concentration on the business needs first. As people are the most important factors in defining business requirements, processes and making business decisions, their active involvement in SOA adoption is essential. SOA adoption is evolutionary rather than revolutionary; it is not possible to be accomplished without cooperation of stakeholders who have effect on the system. Many organizations fail to deliver SOA since they underestimate the role of key business people in SOA development. In order to evolve SOA successfully from business perspective, stakeholder involvement should be conducted from early phases of SOA when important decisions are made and business processes are defined. Service identification is one of the important and main activities in SOA development. This study therefore focuses on service identification of SOA from a business view and regard to stakeholders. Text analysis and interviews are the method components used in this research. Some aspects covering the importance of service identification in SOA development, role of stakeholders in service identification and role of scenarios in stakeholder involvement have been identified through text analysis. And three interviews with experts within the area have verified the identified aspects. The result shows that co-design is an appropriate strategy for conducting service identification regard to stakeholders in an effective way. Different ideas can be visualized, explored and examined through this perspective and a realistic appropriate solution can be found. The challenges of co-design in addressing SOA benefits are also studied through theoretical and empirical parts of the study, and the result is summarized in a table which shows the strengths and weaknesses of co-design strategy in service identification process in addressing SOA goals. The results are categorized to two forms of service identification, consultant driven service identification and internal staff driven service identification. The result of the study can be a contribution in determining the employment of co-design in service identification considering different situations.