En Modell av SOA för Agila Organisationer

Abstract

In a dynamic and unpredictable reality, either rigid structures or silo architectures are appropriate ways to organize an agile organization. This thesis enlightens these relations between Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) and an organization who acts in a varied and constantly changing business environment. In other words, this thesis enlightens the question: “How suitable is SOA to organize the enterprise who will meet a constantly changing and heterogenic business environment”. The thesis presents a model where an efficient organization must be agile to be able to act quickly in the business environments with constantly changing desires, needs, expectations, desires etc. According to the same model a Service Oriented Architecture organizes the enterprise elements such as processes, resources, competences, responsibilities, information systems etc. in a way which promotes fast and efficient acting towards the constantly changing business environments. According to our model an agile organization can meet a varied and constantly changing business environment, if the following conditions are fulfilled: · First, the core idea behind SOA should be given and evaluate in terms of architectural agility and flexibility. This form of agility must constantly be in harmony with the business environments varied and constantly changing character, i.e. “only business agility can meet the business environments varied and constantly changing character”. · Secondly, the agile SOA expects to organize the enterprises autonomic elements in a responsive, robust, innovative, adaptive, flexible and a resilient way. · Lastly, an agile SOA presuppose different form of alignmens such as strategic alignment, operative alignment, motivational alignment, infological alignment and holistic alignment between the enterprises different elements. While business agility demands fast and efficient acting, alignment presupposes some kind of planning and coordination. I.e. the agile SOA must keep (1) fast and local acting and planning of global goals, (2) hard and soft aspects of alignment, (3) environment adaptation and innovation, (4) productivity and flexibility under robust conditions, (5) rational, emotional and ethnic factors, (6) etc., in harmony. This means that SOA´s core idea rather is to find the balance between contradictory factors and to choose one side or an other of the contradictions. Both creation and testing of the model has been based on a systematic approach where the science represents relatively accepted levels of rigor and relevance. The first case deals with the harmony between our model and the scientifically principle methods that has been used. The second case deals with the harmony between the established theories and the practical reality that has been studied. However, our study has focused more on model construction than model testing, because: (1) the ideas of agility and SOA are in early stages of development, (2) the time for planning and realization would exceed the deadline for this thesis, (3) it would be difficult to give a representative answer because there are differences between the understandings of these ideas.