Service Oriented Architecture and Business Innovation

While the approach of Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) has been generally accepted, there are concerns that it is mainly used as a technical IT solution, not as a vehicle for business transformation. An important question, then, is how can SOA support business innovation in practice? We investigated this issue in an in-depth case study at an airline company. Analyzing the relationship between innovation and SOA in the company over time, we offer the following conclusion. We do find that SOA gives strong support to business innovation, under two conditions. First, the implementation of SOA has to be comprehensive, i.e. it should include the core processes of the business. Second, the top management (and partners) need to understand the principles of SOA.