How to Preserve Agility in Service Oriented Architectures - An Explorative Analysis

Although companies introduced enterprise application integration (EAI) a couple of years ago, the complexity of corporate application landscapes is ever increasing. The current wave of technology being introduced into these application landscapes are service oriented architectures (SOA). Not unlike EAI before the introduction of these technologies is associated with re-use of software components and reaping cost cutting potentials. But when looking at the still increasing complexity of application landscapes following the introduction of SOA, the re-use and cost cutting arguments lead to disappointment. However, SOA offers a great potential to increase corporate agility. In order to gain and preserve corporate agility it is necessary to explicitly manage enterprise architecture. This paper discusses the problems of re-use and cost cutting expectations in SOA and contrasts them with the potentials related to make sustainable contributions to corporate agility. Structures, processes, and instruments to realize these potentials are discussed with reference to a literature review as well as to selected case studies.