Service Evaluation in SOA: Toward Business/IT Alignment

When making decisions on whether to deploy services in Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), it is necessary to have some quantitative measures on the effectiveness of the services to business goals. The quantitative measures will greatly help IT managers and/or strategic business planners to perform their jobs. This paper presents an evaluation method for the services in SOA to promote business and IT alignment (BITA). The method proposed in the paper quantitatively evaluates the contribution of the services to the non-functional requirements (NFRs)of IT system. Instead of a single determined value, the evaluated value is modeled as a normally distributed value defined by its mean and variance. As a benefit of using normal distribution, the value will be closer to real value. The proposed method is implemented in a distributed web application tool.The method and the tool are applied in an investment performance analysis system.