A Framework for Assessing Business Value of Service Oriented Architectures Robert Lagerström and Jonas Öhrström
Abstract—This paper presents a framework used for analyzing decisions regarding implementations of service oriented architectures. The framework assesses the business value of SOA by measuring the modification cost, i.e. the effort needed to become service oriented, and the benefits that can be gained for an enterprise using SOA.
between the given benefits of SOA and the modifying effort of making the change to become service oriented. The business value framework has the structure illustrated in Fig. 2.
Index Terms—Business Value, Decision Analysis, Extended Influence Diagrams, Service Oriented Architecture
I. INTRODUCTION
T
O facilitate rational decision making regarding ITenvironments at enterprises Johnson et al. proposed a goal modeling language called Extended Influence Diagrams (EID) [2]. With the use of these diagrams IT-decision makers can analyze what decisions to make in order to achieve their goals. This paper proposes a framework, in the form of an EID, for assessments of the business value of SOA. II. EXTENDED INFLUENCE DIAGRAMS Extended influence diagrams graphically represent a network of nodes and relations. The nodes represent variables, and there are three different types of nodes; decision nodes, chance nodes, and utility nodes. The relations that can be used in an extended influence diagram are either causal, informational, or definitional relations. The syntax for the different relations and nodes is presented in Fig. 1. More information on extended influence diagrams can be found in [2][3][4].
Fig. 1. The syntax of extended influence diagrams.
III. THE SOA BUSINESS VALUE FRAMEWORK Business value with SOA is defined as the combination Final manuscript received March 25, 2007 Robert Lagerström is with the Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden. (phone: +4687906866; fax: +4687906839; e-mail:
[email protected]). Jonas Öhrström is with the consultant firm Net Result (phone: +46733407067, e-mail:
[email protected]).
Fig. 2. An overview of the Business Value with SOA framework.
A. The modification effort sub-EID The modification effort to become service-oriented has its origin in the system property, modifiability. Several definitions can be found on the concept of modifiability, these can be divided into three main categories [5]; definitions focusing on the process of maintaining or modifying, definitions focusing on the effort of change, or definitions that place the concept in a hierarchy of software attributes. In this paper the effort of change is used as a definition, and it has been divided into two separate parts; the modifiability of the system and the complexity of the change. System modifiability is measured in or is causally affected by attributes such as; system complexity, analyzability, age of system etc. Change complexity is divided into attributes such as; size of change, number of components and systems involved in change, experience of maintenance personnel etc. B. The SOA benefits sub-EID The degree of benefits with SOA is measured by the degree of increased revenues within the organization, degree of degreased costs within the organization and the level of positive internal organizational effects. Some possible increases in revenues with SOA are; the possibility to create and overcome competitive pressure, that new markets can be reached by more easily exposed system features and by the simplicity of redesign, it might also be easier to provide services to other organizations without
having to exchange internal system features. Another possible increase in revenues could be that customer satisfaction may be increased by fast response to satisfy customer needs and the ability to enable automation, self-services and expose of services in real time. Possible decreases in costs within the organization are; that effective integration is enabled by open standard technology and vendor neutral communication frameworks, streamlined supply-chains, simplified business processes, reduced human touch-points, cut transaction costs and improved customer service. Further, SOA is said to open up for collaborative planning and fulfillment between organizations which reduces relationship interaction costs. SOA in an ideal state also enables real-time access to diverse data which may decrease inventory costs and lead to decreased cycle times. Another important aspect is that reduced maintenance could be enabled by removing redundancy in data storage. SOA could also make the development process more effective due to its flexible characteristic features. SOA also makes it possible to consume existing services at the organization and services provided by other organizations, this might sometimes be to a lower cost than to develop new services. SOA will also most probably enable more streamlined and flexible architectures to fit the business processes. Finally, productivity may be increased within IT-departments, developers, and end-users with SOA. SOA affects the organization in many ways and acceptance and understandability of SOA are highly important factors for success. With SOA, systems may be organized and expressed in a fashion that is easy to understand for all participators. This increase in quality of communication may further increase the quality of business-aligned system solutions. The entire framework with all underlying variables can be found in [12] and more comprehensive information on both revenues, costs, and internal effects can be found in [1][6][7][8][9][10][11]. IV. AN ASSESSMENT USING THE FRAMEWORK The business value of SOA framework presented in section III has been used to assess a service oriented implementation at a nuclear power plant in Sweden. In the assessment three scenarios where analyzed and compared; Scenario 1 is a scenario using an “ordinary architecture”, Scenario 2 is an isolated SOA pilot implementation, and Scenario 3 is a full scale SOA implementation. The result of the assessment is to be used when deciding what strategy to use when it comes to implementing SOA at the power plant. Using the proposed analysis method in [2] the value of the utility node is calculated for each scenario. The result of the assessment is presented graphically in Fig. 3.
Fig. 3. The business value with SOA for each defined scenario.
The outcome of the analysis shows that Scenario 2 has a lower service oriented business value then Scenario 1. However an extension of the implemented service oriented architecture using the same technology and the gained experience using the vendor’s service oriented environment will give about a twenty percent higher business value in the future. By employing this extension of Scenario 2 to Scenario 3 the following advantages may be gained; higher usability, increased flexibility of creating streamlined service process oriented solutions, higher customer satisfaction, increased productivity, and reduced administration through more effective services and self-services. V. CONCLUSIONS This paper presented a framework for assessing business value of service oriented architectures. The evaluation of a SOA implementation at a nuclear power plant indicates that a fully scaled SOA implementation will result in the highest SOA business value, this advocates further implementations using the same service oriented technique as in the investigated pilot implementation. REFERENCES Erl T., Service-Oriented Architecture, Concepts, Technology, and Design, Pearson Education, Inc, 2002 [2] Johnson P. et al., Extended Influence Diagrams for Enterprise Architecture Analysis, In Proceedings of the 10th IEEE International Annual Enterprise Distributed Object Computing Conference, 2006 [3] Johnson P. and Ekstedt M., Enterprise Architecture – Models and Analyses for Information Systems Decision Making, To Appear, 2007 [4] Lagerström R. et al., Extended Influence Diagram Generation, In Proceedings of the Interoperability for Enterprise Software and Applications Conference, 2007 [5] Oman P., Hagemeister J. and Ach D., A Definition and Taxonomy for Software Maintainability, Software Engineering Lab, 1992 [6] Swende E., The business value of SOA Service Oriented Architecture, IRM, 2006 [7] Söderström E. et al., Serviam Company Visits, Part II – Business Value, www.serviam.se, 2005 [8] Söderström E., Serviam Literature Survey, Part II - Business Value, Serviam-lit-02, www.serviam.se, 2005 [9] Yau S.S, Replication for Adaptive Responsiveness in Service-Oriented System, IEEE, 2005 [10] Vinoski S., The Social Side of Services, IONA Technologies, IEEE Computer Society, 2006 [11] Wiktorin L., Systemutveckling på 2000-talet, Studentlitteratur, 2003 [12] Öhrström J., Business Value using Service Oriented Architecture, M. Th. at the Royal Institute of Technology, 2007 [1]
