A Framework to Support Service-Oriented Architecture Investment Decision

Service-oriented architecture (SOA) is a system paradigm that structures business functions as loosely coupled services to enable business agility. SOA requires significant up-front investments, and in return, promises a vast array of benefits. Unfortunately, in contrast to the costs of the investment, monetary benefits associated with SOA are more difficult to measure. For one reason, benefits such as increased agility or improved flexibility are elusive in nature, making it harder to define metrics for their calculation. For another, SOA value is realized in long term under uncertainty, and traditional capital budgeting methods often fail to capture uncertainty when valuing investments. In this paper, we provide a decision framework to analyze the monetary impact of SOA investment in an organization. Combining traditional NPV analysis with option pricing models, our framework accounts for operational and strategic costs and benefits of SOA and proposes an extended investment value to support managerial investment decision.