SOA and EA - Sustainable Contributions for Increasing Corporate Agility

Service oriented architectures (SOA) have been introduced for various reasons over the previous couple of years. Analogous to the introduction of enterprise application integration (EAI) technologies before re-use and cost cutting potentials have been among the most prominent reasons. But considering the increasing complexity of an application landscape following the introduction of a SOA, the re-use and cost cutting arguments will lead to disappointment. However, service oriented architectures offer a great potential to increase corporate agility. To sustainable preserve corporate agility it is necessary to explicitly manage the enterprise architecture. This paper discusses the problems of re-use and cost cutting expectations in service oriented architectures and contrasts them with the potentials related to make sustainable contributions to corporate agility. Structures, processes, and instruments to realize these potentials are discussed with reference to selected case studies.