Service-oriented Architecture Projects in Practice: A Study of a Shared Document Service Implementation

This paper reports on a case study focusing on service-oriented architecture (SOA) projects in practice. The aim of these projects has been to develop a shared document service supporting different business divisions in a large Norwegian governmental institution. The research question guiding this research is: How are SOA projects carried out in practice? What are the challenges of developing shared services in service-oriented architecture? SOA projects are accompanied by a complex socio-technical system development environment. In the present study we followed parallel system development processes and identified several issues associated with competence requirements, distributed coordination principles and control, lack of communication, tuning of parallel projects, and selection of appropriate project management approaches and system development methods. Clearly, there was a difference between undertaking a system development project within one organizational unit (silo) compared to the development of shared services to provide support across a large organization. Findings demonstrate that the complexity of SOA projects was underestimated by the project managers, and ad hoc governance was practiced in terms of control, coordination, and communication. To capture the entire system development context of an SOA project, a holistic approach and mind-set comprising time management and fine tuning of all parallel SD activities is necessary. Organizational maturity to carry out SOA projects is also of significance. The study has implications for SOA adopters in general and for system developers and project managers working in an SOA context in particular.