Strategies for Establishing Service Oriented Design in Organizations

Service orientation is a broadly discussed design paradigm for information systems engineering. Only recently there have been several contributions to individual dimensions of service orientation like service definition, service modeling, service management or service governance. However, a combination of useful solutions for partial problems might not constitute an effective overall approach to service orientation. We argue that the establishment of service orientation is a wicked [design] problem, i.e. poorly formulated, confusing, and permeated with conflicting values of many decision makers or other stakeholders. Therefore this paper focuses on understanding the design problem of establishing service orientation in organizations in its design dimensions. The paper identifies four strategies for establishing service orientation and derives four propositions on the development paths which may connect these strategies.