Use of SOA 3.0 in Strategic Information System Planning

Atif Farid Mohammad, Emanuel S. Grant, Sanchit Goyal, Aashish Bhatia Department of Computer Science, University of North Dakota, Grand Forks, ND, USA

{Atif.Mohammad, Aashish.Bhatia, Sanchit.Goyal} @und.edu, grante@cs.und.edu Abstract - This research paper puts light on the competitive advantage of IT for professional service industries using strategic information system planning (SISP) and the new paradigm in service oriented architecture SOA 3.0. A service provider can obtain competitive advantage from its competing businesses by offering its customers better value, by means of better benefits and services with affordable low cost solutions to its consumers. This advantage can be achieved by using strategic information system planning (SISP). A service provider has to go through a major change in its policies and procedure to provide end-user services by introducing the methodology of SOA 3.0. This is a complicated task and introduces a major change for all inter-organizational stakeholders. This change is initiated from planning for IS/IT internal and external users, based on a competitive business strategy to win the consumer’s trust. The discussion in this paper covers the utilization of information communication technology by airlines for competitive advantage. This paper also discusses the gap between research in academia and practices in the industry and, how to overcome this gap by embedding current research into the general practices of the industry.

Index Terms - Strategic information system planning (SISP), SOA 3.0, Competitive Advantage, B2B2C

I. INTRODUCTION

The advent of the information age has brought significant change into our lives as being end-users in terms of working for some organization or being a consumer. We use computers everyday, almost everywhere and this use provides us convenience in terms of our required information as well as our day-to-day needs fulfillment and the professional use of the computer for industry accelerated innovation [1]. The lone individual with a computer as an end-user has given way to networks uniting computers and users for greater efficiency to produce more results at one time. The combination of hardware (computers), software (operating systems and various other applications such as Microsoft Office and other customized solutions) and networking technologies, which we call in general

as IT, has enabled us to meet our day-to-day business needs in an integrated and effective way.

As consumers, we do not see the underlying current of change that ensues as businesses strive to provide products and services. Automotive garages still repair and maintain our vehicles; we still use phones, both land lines and cellular, for our everyday telecommunication needs. Financial service organizations still provide us our everyday financial services needs, airlines are providing us the travel facilities as well as the e-booking [2] of our trips and many more facilities, as well as hotels still provide accommodations to travelers. Generally, businesses do not change their core practices very frequently. However, innovation can play a role in the background of a business, bringing in new products or coming up with ways to attain more consumer attention while maintaining core business as usual.

To survive, industries sometimes have to make vital changes to their core business functionalities. The introduction of new product lines, marketing campaigns, promotional advertising, etc. can be good examples of this form of background change. Any information system can be a change for an organizational goals, processes, product lines, or business to business or consumer relationships to help in gaining a competitive advantage in the market against the rival service/product providers. Few examples for such systems are “Enterprise Information System Management Information System Transaction Processing System”, etc.

Figure 1.1: Services Figure 1.2: Distributed services

Let us take an example to explore service oriented architecture. Each puzzle piece given in Figure 1.1 is a service provided by a retailer, travel agency, bank or a government service provider. These services are available around the world, as an offshoot of global business. Figure 1.2 depicts the servers providing these distributed services across the globe. Using internet as Cloud, these services can be accessed almost anywhere in the world. The magic of SOA works for consumers as well as industrial internal-operational and

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managerial users. The use of SOA generates the structure of these services shown in Figure 1.3.

Figure 1.3: The magic of SOA

SOA evolved in stages over the last few decades, since industrial automation increased in frequency. The services we use today process requests as data input and output for customers and other systems or services. These services orchestrate our data when generating messaging among each other and to us as the user. The operational users of these services can monitor or manage many requests simultaneously. These operations can also be performed by a mediator service designed to follow the agreed policies and procedures among each of these services. Each service is owned and governed by a business entity and works within a certain body of rules defined by the policymakers.

This paper recommends the use of strategic information system planning (SISP) to take advantage of the novel methodology of SOA 3.0, which is to support an organization and influence its strategic direction by identifying the value-adding use of information technology (IT) by incorporating and harmonizing diverse technologies both software and hardware. For an organization to become competitive in present-day market situations, where it becomes critical to harness the technology resources power [3] and strategic information system planning (SISP) allows the management to develop strategies for successful systems development, which is acceptable for all stakeholders, specifically the end-users of the organization and their consumers. This research paper is comprised of background studies of both IT and its use for general and strategic purposes. It continues discussing a holistic concept of IT and its strategic use to keep the end-users in the sight of industries to expand and provide better services and products as being competitive. The article also provides a look at two case studies conducted in two major professional players of today’s contemporary market.

II. BACKGROUND

The background of this paper consists details about both strategic information systems planning (SISP) as well as service oriented architecture (SOA). A. Strategic Information Systems Planning

Since 1970s the concept of strategic information system planning (SISP) has evolved significantly [4, 5]. This evolution has been driven because of the rapid change in technology and the evolving structure of

inter-related business environments. The challenges of the present financial climate as per the global economic meltdown can be resolved by all decision maker executives, such as CEOs, CFOs, COOs, CIOs and MIS managers, by aligning business needs, using service components to improve service to consumers within a tight budget constraint.

At the time SISP started to come into use in organizations, these changes in IT field had already created many challenges due to continuous innovation. Exploratory analysis had been primarily utilized for SISP. It is found that most of the studies have the comprehensive concentration on techniques and methodologies to align strategies of business and IS infrastructure on planning content [6, 7, 8 and 9].

Strategic Information Systems Planning (SISP) can largely help organizations by aligning the information system (IS) development process with their business objectives and in turn by significantly leveraging their competitive positioning [10]. It smartly and systematically employs the IT investments by an organization for development of its technology policies and architectures.

The research work and discussions on competitive advantage in business through the use of IT date back to the 1980s [11][12].Businesses capitalize on competitive theories from management studies to sustain a competitive advantage in the market. A significant amount of research has also been conducted in the field of implementation of SISP, majorly concerned with the procedure and factors involved in a successful implementation of the system. However there is a significant difference between the academic research concerned with the practical use of SISP and its actual implementation by the organizations. Academic literature is largely ignored by them in their SISP endeavors. Studies indicate that practitioners worldwide are skeptical about the academic knowledge base behind it [13]. It largely is a resultant of the poor foundation for deriving well grounded procedures for conducting SISP [13]. Most propositions are fairly based on common sense and concepts laid out in textbooks, thus inadequately supported by a substantial research in the field and mostly untested. Thus it has been observed generally that implementers rely more on peer recommendations and external consultants than academia due to the aforementioned reason [13].

Information Systems and Management Research is widely considered to be an applied science and of great practical relevance for various organizations. However the difference between academic research and practical implementation not only creates a gap between the two, it also hinders the traditional research methods from refining the academic knowledge in the area. Since quantitative questionnaire research will not

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deliver valid results if respondents and researchers use terms differently and have non matching perceptions of the problems [13]. B. Service Oriented Architecture

Software architecture is a vital part of software engineering, and Service Oriented Architectures (SOA) presents an advanced architectural concept with significance. Dorner et al. [14] have brought forward a few considerations of SOA in terms of End User Development (EUD). They analyzed the development of adaptable systems as a potential for SOA, proposing challenges that need to be solved to get an effective EUD. The authors’ analysis is based on requirements for EUD systems and empirical studies, taken from earlier research work [15]. Dorner et al. have suggested in their study, that SOAs can be extended with structures for in-use modifications; the design of user-adaptable next-generation systems is also possible.

SOA is an adaptable and flexible approach to use IT. SOA facilitates the utilization of reusable IT components to create new solutions over an existing framework of components.The challenges of the present financial climate can be resolved by software engineers and decision makers, such as CTOs or MIS managers, by aligning business needs, using service components to improve service to consumers within a tight budget constraint. SOA is a boon to an enterprise looking to create service components in an agile fashion and reuse an existing components infrastructure.

According to Schreiner and Lamb [16], systems of the future will be based on the concepts of SOA. Service applications will be composed of a number of individual services running at several servers. As illustrated by Erl [17], service component application logic can be divided into two levels: a service interface, where loosely coupled services are available with their implementation and technology platform; and a service-using application level in which service application logic is developed and deployed on different technology platforms. These services communicate via open protocols.

III. HOLISTIC CONCEPTUAL IT USE

Let us discuss a holistic concept of an IT model for

a retailer’s sales service and a financial services provider’s system of services provision to the consumers. The methods of selling and services provision have become more complicated than what they used to be before the initiation of e-Commerce and web-presence of such organizations. Owing to the systems and models put into use by giant retailers like

Wal-Mart, Target, Costco etc., and financial services sector organizations like American Express, Bank of America, Citi-Financial Group etc., the use of IT and internet has enormously increased for the consumers as well as the serving organizations. The services and retail sector is increasingly moving towards web-enabled systems and the competition for gaining a larger market share is getting intense as the days are passing by. IS and IT systems are offering more ease at both work and home for consumers. It is an era of revolution in our current economic infrastructure as well as the service and retail industry. The competition in providing quality services guarantee and the range of products is getting minimal; the importance for service providers and retailers is now to maintain their customers’ loyalty.

Retail and service industry has to find a certain balance between the day-to-day use merchandize, its inventory restocking as well as suitable, fast and efficient service needs. A direct consequence of the increased competition in the market has been an increase in the options that are available to the consumers, which in turn has fueled their demand for at par services and products, suited to their individual needs. B2B, B2C or B2B2C is leading all stakeholders involved towards globalization and mergers among retail industry peers [2]. The consumers are getting smarter with the mass of information available to them. Section IV provides a detailed methodology, which can be effectively used by the practitioners using SISP to get a competitive advantage in our contemporary environment. IV. SOA 3.0 NEW SYSTEM PARADIGM

SOA 3.0 is a novel introduction of ASOA-SRD [18] or Achievable SOA with the use of System Requirement Design methodology. It is an approach to designing a SOA solution to represent, revise and develop software systems or services required by any organization as a stakeholder. In SISP the decision makers can initiate the incorporation of the elements of requirements into a finished software system in a deployable combination of applications with a single frame of reference. The fundamentals of the SRD ontology are requirements of requesting stakeholders distributed in elements, once amalgamated in the phase of processing to produce a block of an application for deployment.

A block in SRD is a combination of several elements. The design of an application or, in view of SRD, a block starts with an “Initiation Marker”. A design combining several blocks can be shown by this marker only, in case there are several blocks (applications) involved in a finalized system.

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Requirements contain raw material elements in a scattered form. Software engineers use their skills to combine these elements in a processing phase to build an application block. The building of these blocks to achieve targets can also be understood as the required performance of the deployed application.

Table 1: SRD Methodology [18]

Figure 1: A combination of several services

Concerns about the behaviour of different elements of requirements and how they might differ from each other is addressed using the communication links, which establish a relationship in a logical order among these elements. These links communicate static, time-independent relations between pairs of elements of a requirement. These communication links specialize into 1 to 1, 1 to M and M to 1 or M to M element linking. A communication link can be labeled with a textual tag by the software engineer to communicate a consequential relation connecting the two linked elements. These links are ubiquitous and provide the system designer with a constructive elements relationship representation for non-technical stakeholders to view.

Figure 2: A functional example of an SRD

The processing operator shown in Figure 2 is a drill down in the service S1. The processing operator P1

connects and relates elements to show the logical flow to construct a block in order to illustrate the performance of a desired system. The performance of a system is illustrated in two foremost ways, expressed by the combination of communicational links and conditional operators. A processing operator can have several inner processing operators related to each other directly or indirectly; one or several of these processing operators can be used to serve some other block of the system on a simultaneous basis. Let us assume the notations as shown below:

L = List of Services, S1 = Service 1 P1 = Process Operator 1 P1.1= Idle Service, P1.2= Working

L is a list of services available in the Cloud containing a combination of S1, S2 and S3 (the services provided by a service provider) and D1 (a service provided by a data centre in the Cloud). There can be two major processes a service can be in—0 and 1. The service is Idle or Working. The service might be idle due to no job being needed to be done at this moment in time. The working service might also be idle, as there can be a delay in receiving some messages for other services or a data centre of some kind. P1.1 and P1.2 can further be drilled down. The Figure 3 shows a prototype of getting required information for the service user of L from data centre service D.

Figure 3: A working service prototype

The Processing Operator shown in Figure 2 is a drill down in the service S1. The processing operator P1 connects and relates elements to show the logical flow to construct a block in order to illustrate the performance of a desired system. The performance of a system is illustrated in two foremost ways, expressed by the combination of communicational links and conditional operators. A processing operator can have several inner processing operators related to each other directly or indirectly; one or several of these processing operators can be used to serve some other block of the system on a simultaneous basis. Let us assume the notations as shown below:

L = List of Services, S1 = Service 1 P1 = Process Operator 1 P1.1= Idle Service, P1.2= Working

L is a list of services available in the Cloud containing a combination of S1, S2 and S3 (the services provided by a service provider) and D1 (a service provided by a data centre in the Cloud). There can be two major processes a service can be in—0 and 1. The service is

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Idle or Working. The service might be idle due to no job being needed to be done at this moment in time. The working service might also be idle, as there can be a delay in receiving some messages for other services or a data centre of some kind. P1.1 and P1.2 can further be drilled down. The Figure 2 shows a prototype of getting required information for the service user of L from data centre service D.

Figure 4: Another pictorial view of SRD

The service S1 as shown in Figure 4 is the actual service built as an application block. This service block S1 connects with another service, D1, to get the required data for the user of service L. The processing block as shown in earlier Figure 2 can be seen as an independent processing operator connecting two services by communication of the requestor’s requirement, and the operator gets the resultant data set(s) and delivers it to the requestor. Let us look into further details of these services; L is a listing service of several services.

V. CASE STUDIES

A case study was conducted by Buhalis [2], looking into the information communication technology adaptation by airlines to compete in advanced technology world. The research work [2] primarily looks into the two questions, how and why did the airline industry do it? As was mentioned in the holistic conceptual use of IT for competitive advantage, industry is in a continuous need of change and can not entirely rely on traditional legacy systems that were built decades ago. The consumer today is much more smarter, has way more information to assist him/her in making a purchase-related decision and may even change his/her mind after making a purchase to go with someone else for a better deal. As mentioned in [2] “ICTs play a critical role in the strategic and operational management of airlines”, is true for almost all sorts of businesses due the technological advancement.

Another case study was conducted in summer 2003 by Teubner [13] based on the idea of assigning roles to students of a university as key SISP practitioners and to take part in the study project. Author [13] has also conducted the research with an actual financial services provider organization and found that there was a significant gap between the use of SISP in academia and how it is employed in actual practice in the

industry. The results of the research using this dual research approach were effective. It helped students learn about SISP in depth and kept the financial services-providing organization participants motivated until the end of the study to achieve better results as being practitioners of the SISP approach.

The purchase planning scenario of a commercial or residential property is taken here as another case study of a system where the property-selling agency can be provided a flexible approach using SOA. The levels discussed above can be adapted as application and service interface levels. We now take a closer look at how SOA helps to plan a purchase, instantiate, and adapt the composed property purchase service. Initially, three services can be identified as:

i) “Property for sale” search service ii) Offer submission to initiate a purchase service iii) Credit check and mortgage service

In this example, partner service implementations are selected as follows. The “property for sale” service can be a local server provided by the real estate agency. The offer submission service can be the web services provided by another agency, or it can be assumed by law firm service providers. Such legal purchase services may provide the possibility of applying web service policies, but apart from that, the services might not be configurable. The credit check service is a web service provided by the financial department of a bank or a mortgage provider. Considering the strict security requirements of financial transactions, these services typically have fixed functional and nonfunctional requirements—i.e., security policies—that cannot be altered. Duo to SOA, these services can be combined at one front-end platform on a website to provide the “property for sale” information and other services as mentioned above. To make this clear, we can take the example of Amazon’s [4] store-front. Customers use a browser to get the displays on Amazon.ca.

The front-end website infers the signals or the customer’s intent triggers and calls upon services that do things like acquiring the data for the current on sale products, or getting the customer’s order. The important thing to note here is that the servicing components do not make proposals to the customers, and these services have no idea who they are talking to. These services are serving customers by getting data from some other services, which might be residing at some other server and can provide only product details. Some other services might be obtaining customer order details to invoke other services for shipping the products. The business sector is searching for ways to convert its Information Technology or Management Information System departments to swiftly adapt to

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changing business needs. SOA facilitates service orientation.

VI. CONCLUSION

The target of bridging the gap between academia research and its use in our contemporary world of business is not solely focused on the implementation of the research into the practitioners’ day to day processes. It can also introduce the ease-of-achievement for the industries of their goals to both satisfy the customers, while becoming competitive with their rivals. There are several factors which create a hindrance in bridging this gap, the lack of industrial participation in academia research initiatives and fewer resources available to the educational institutions, being the major ones. In recent years the industry has realized the importance of research and development (R&D) work and this can be seen from number of R&D oriented academic ventures that have been sponsored by major organizations such as Google, Microsoft, British Petroleum, Exxon Mobil, Petro-Canada and Research in Motion (RIM), aiming to become more strategically competitive for the future.

The core base of strategic information system planning (SISP) is on conventional strategic management. Previously, the establishment of strategic choices used to be made by senior IT executives by categorizing IT requirements coherently, indifferent from other business processes, procedures and policies and this used to be conducted in a sequential manner. However, this approach is not suited in our current business market as the businesses and enterprises need to carry on a continuous adjustment in their practices as per the current market environment. SISP is considered as a change catalyst. It introduces change for the organization adapting SISP methodology to compete in an unstable economic environment, where as per Porter et. al., [19] both of the external forces as well as internal forces threatens the structure and dynamics of an organization providing services and/or products. It is recommended here for the industries and business organizations to use SISP to face the increasingly changing world of consumers. It is a vital fact that the service/product provider has an existence only when it has a loyal customer.

SOA 3.0 is a novel approach that provides an efficient and cost effective methodology for organizations to achieve their required services fast and easy. Practitioners of SISP can adapt SOA 3.0 to achieve cost effective and efficient solutions.

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