AMCIS 2006 Panel Summary: Towards the Service Oriented Enterprise Vision: Bridging Industry and Academics

The complexities and costs of current information architectures, infrastructures, and distributed data and software have provided impetus to emerging conceptualizations of the Service Oriented Enterprise (SOE). The foundations for SOE can be found in current applications of service oriented architecture (SOA), service oriented infrastructure (SOI), business process and workflow, computing resource virtualization, business semantics, service level agreements, increasing standardization, and other areas of applied research. This article reports on a panel held at the 2006 Americas Conference on Information Systems (AMCIS) in Acapulco, Mexico, regarding the impacts of SOE tenets on the IS field. Two organizations that are at the leading edge of the SOE continuum [American Express and Intel] in terms of vision and experiences were represented by Margaret Mitchell and George Brown. In addition, MIS academics were represented on the panel by the authors, researchers from Arizona State University. Both industry and academics brought unique perspectives. American Express’ SOE approach addresses organizational structure and business intelligence project workflow issues. The company hosts one of the largest IT infrastructures capable of handling untold numbers of transactions each second. Intel’s SOE approach addresses the orchestration of services and workflows in the cross-architecture environments characterizing the modern extended global enterprise. Intel is playing a lead role in establishing the OASIS (the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards) SOA Reference Model (called ‘ebSOA’).