Critical Success Factors for the Implementation of Enterprise Service Oriented Architecture (ESOA)

Abstract

Enterprise service-oriented architecture (ESOA) has received a considerable amount of attention in the last decade. Its capability in increasing the agility of organisations has been well recognised. Despite its popularity, the existing literature relevant to ESOA implementation tends to focus only on the technical aspect of its implementation. ESOA is defined as a style of architecture for the enterprise. However, little effort has been made in the current literature in understanding the critical factors for its successful implementation from an enterprise wide perspective. The purpose of this research is to fill the gap in existing literature. In particular, we will look at the concepts around ESOA in order to clarify its definition. Furthermore, we will attempt to identify the critical success factors (CSFs) for the implementation of ESOA from the architecture for enterprise perspective. In order to identify the CSFs, we also need to identify the meaning of success for ESOA implementation. In addition, we need to understand the relationship between the meaning of success and the CSFs. The identification of the meaning of success and the CSFs is carried out through the use of explorative Delphi study. Experts with extensive exposure to ESOA implementation are invited to the Delphi study. These include researchers, vendors, implementation partners, and implementation participants from organisations. These experts have diversified experiences, which includes experts sitting in the ESOA steering committee, chief information officer, enterprise architects, business architects, solution architects, project managers, business analysts and developers. The Delphi study is carried out in three rounds. The purpose of the first round is to identify the success characteristics and the CSFs for ESOA implementation. The findings from Delphi round one are then combined with the literature review. A set of models that capture the relationships between these two are then proposed based on the combined findings. The purpose of the subsequent Delphi rounds is to obtain the importance ratings for the identified items and the agreement ratings for the models. The final outcomes from the Delphi study are then presented to a group of experts. These experts are asked to validate the results by relating their actual ESOA implementation experience to the findings. Interviews are used as the data collection method for the validation process. By utilising the explorative Delphi study and the confirmative interview, we have identified 31 items in consensus for successful ESOA implementation. These CSFs can be further summarised into 9 grouping factors (i.e. themes) that cover from vision, goals and strategy and architecture plan to technical implementation. In addition, we have identified 13 success characteristics that could define the meaning of success for ESOA implementation. These success characteristics can be summarised into 3 grouping factors (i.e. success perspectives) that represent where the success comes from (namely business perspective, service perspective and IT perspective). In addition to these items, we have developed two conceptual models at a different level of abstraction to describe the relationships between the success perspectives and the themes. The first model is a high level conceptual model that depicts how each theme contributes to the overall success of ESOA implementation. The key message from this model is that all the CSFs and themes identified are important for the successful implementation of ESOA. The second model is a detailed level conceptual model. It shows that the level of challenges in addressing the CSFs within each theme will vary based on the outcome that organisations are expecting from ESOA implementation. Firstly, the challenges involved for addressing the CSFs in all themes will increase as organisations shift their focus from getting success in the short term to success in the long term. Secondly, when organisations change their focus from achieving the success from the IT perspective to achieving the success from the business perspective, the challenges would be to shift from the technical implementation and skills to the ESOA governance and ESOA transformation blueprint. Lastly, the longer term the success the organisations are aiming for from the business perspective, the more challenges in addressing the CSFs within ESOA transformation blueprint theme as well as the ESOA governance theme.