Business driven consolidation of SOA implementations

Abstract

Changes are continuously happening in enterprises and they impact the IT landscape. The most drastic among them are mergers and acquisitions, but recent trends like globalization and recession also lead companies to adopt new business consolidation strategies. Today, very limited support is provided to companies undergoing consolidation: the business to IT alignment is implicit, the task of identifying major IT changes compared to minor ones is pain-staking, and the ability to provide insights of the IT system as result of one strategy over another is impossible. In this paper, we are interested in precise methods that can characterize the impact of business consolidations on the companies' SOA based IT implementation, wherein the service interfaces are explicitly exposed. Our solution is to model the business to SOA dependencies and use the model to analyze IT consolidation choices when triggered by business consolidation decisions. © 2010 IEEE.