Service-Oriented Enterprises and Architectures: State of the Art and Research Opportunities

To survive in the global marketplace, organizations need to continually adapt to the changing business environment. Information systems play an ever increasing role in helping organizations achieve this objective. Recently, there has been considerable attention paid to the service orientation and how it could alter the way organizations function and their relationships with business partners such as suppliers. In this research, we focus on service-oriented enterprises and architectures. In doing so, we bring to the fore the current state of the art in the emerging service paradigm. Service-oriented computing is revolutionizing the way corporations manage information so as to enable streamlining the various stages of computing including strategic planning, business process management, operations processing, and information technology services. We demonstrate how the application of service orientation to a supply chain will lead to service-centric supply chains that offer significantly more enterprise agility. We also discuss opportunities for future research in the new paradigm.