Towards an Economic Justification of Service Oriented Architectures - Measuring the Financial Impact

Service oriented architectures (SOA) herald a new generation of application systems. Whereas current systems were to be chosen and operated as self-contained systems of individual vendors, service oriented architectures allow for integrating application functionality from different sources internal or external to a company according to individual needs within a specific context. Vendors of ERP systems are developing service oriented product variants and intermediaries for trading services over the internet have established already. Therefore, companies are increasingly confronted with the question, to what extend the adoption of SOA turns out to be a profitable venture. As out-payments can be well estimated, the question is: “What is the actual economic value to be gained by utilizing SOA-enabled systems and what monetary consequences are associated with a SOA adoption?” With this contribution we present an approach to measure the financial impact of SOA based on conceptual process models.