Computing Strategic Trade-Offs in Web Service Deployment and Selection

The subject of business-IT alignment has increasingly attracted the attention of executives in the past decade. The purpose is to leverage the potential of IT to improve business performance. This goal can be achieved by developing mechanisms to enhance the communication between business and IT. In the same track, its essential to apply methods to assure that IT investments are driven by the strategic goals and priorities of the company. Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA)is widely recognized as a technology that promotes IT alignment and business agility. However, strategic goals of firms have been frequently neglected when dealing with technical subjects such as web service selection and deployment. In this work, we propose a multiple criteria decision method based on the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) that is able to accommodate in a single framework both the technical and the strategic requirements of web service deployment and selection. Our framework help IT managers to find the configuration that best translates the preferences of the customer and the priorities of the company. A numeric case study compares our approach to other traditional uses of AHP.