The paradigm of service-oriented computing (SOC) has emerged as an approach to provide flexibility and agility, not just in systems development but also in business process management. This modular approach to defining business flows as technology independent services has gained unanimous popularity among end-users and technology vendors alike. Although there is a significant amount of ongoing research on the potential of service oriented architectures (SOAs), there is a paucity of research literature on the factors affecting the adoption of service-oriented computing in practice. This paper reviews the current state of the technology, identifies the factors influencing the decision to adopt service-oriented computing as an enterprise strategy and discusses the associated research literature, and concludes with a suggested research agenda and conceptual framework for investigating the use of service-oriented computing in practice.

/pdf/service-oriented-computing-in-practice-an-agenda-for-1dd7boddic.pdf

Service oriented computing in practice: an agenda for research into the factors influencing the organizational adoption of service oriented architectures

Today, the means for attaining competitive advantage with information technology (IT) has shifted from efficiently managing the organization's operations to discovering ways to collaborate with industry partners to provide products and services to markets that are otherwise uneconomical to pursue. Current IT challenges center on ways to integrate diverse systems into function rich business processes that span organizational boundaries. Though service oriented architecture (SOA) is poised to become a mainstream technology, its success may hinge on a meeting of the minds between the architects and developers of Web services and business process modelers who map out corporate requirements. This paper defines SOA, discusses how SOA relates to business process management, and provides an illustration of enterprise SOA applied in an enterprise resource planning (ERP) environment. The paper also describes how SOA motivates change in IT governance, enumerates the fundamentals of SOA success, and reflects on implications for IT education.

Service Oriented Architecture: Challenges for Business and Academia

Purpose – This paper aims to demonstrate how higher education in Finland can benefit from using methods such as Web 2.0 technologies.Design/methodology/approach – The paper describes how different types of learners (auditory, visual, kinaesthetic) benefit from being exposed to new methods and tools in the tuition process (traditional teaching settings). The strengths and weaknesses of these alternative teaching methods and tools are assessed. The paper is based on a case study – a pilot project – where the Prezi presentation tool and Twitter were tested and used in a university teaching setting. Findings – The results of the study show that both students and faculty found the utilization of Prezi and Twitter in teaching improved the learning and teaching experience.Originality/value – In Finland, the use of Prezi and Twitter in the classroom is not common. The results of this study should help encourage other teachers in Finland to implement new methods and tools in the tuition process.

Diversifying higher education: facilitating different ways of learning

Weight-modeling of B2C system quality

The authors report in this article from a survey of medium-sized and large software companies in Denmark where major variations were found in the practice of software process improvement SPI. Many software companies intend to do SPI; but few companies invest the necessary effort in improvement, and few perform maturity assessments. In general, across the surveyed companies, the effects of SPI are very limited. The study also found that internal motivators are more frequent than external motivators. This article presents and discusses the survey and the results. It also discusses implications for IT organizations and professionals and recommends: 1 assessing the maturity level; 2 allocating sufficient resources to SPI; and 3 creating a positive feedback loop between SPI benefits and SPI efforts.

Success Factors and Motivators in SPI

Web Services technologies and their supporting collection of de facto standards are now reaching the point of maturity where they are appearing in production software systems. Service Oriented Architectures (SOAs) using Web Services as an enabling technology are also being discussed widely in the IT press. However, despite the numerous and real advantages of these architectural patterns there are still many software quality challenges that remain unresolved. This is particularly true as we consider more advanced architectures that exploit the technology to its maximum advantage: utility computing and on-demand service discovery and composition, grid computing and multi-agent systems will only become pervasive once the software quality challenges of real-world industrial applications have been addressed. In this paper potential quality issues such as performance, reliability and availability are addressed in terms of the quality assurances that might need to be provided to consumers of services. Proposed XML-based Service Level Agreement (SLA) languages are reviewed as a means of providing these quality assurances in machine-readable ways. We also discuss how SLAs might be automatically negotiated to enable automated, on-demand service discovery and composition. The next section of this paper addresses quality issues from a service provider's perspective. The providers of such services will need to ensure that SLA commitments are met and this poses interesting problems in terms of application management. Network quality of service is currently addressed through such means as IntServ and DiffServ. Research proposals to introduce similar techniques at an application level are described. From the service consumer's perspective, interesting research proposals for proactively ensuring that good quality of service is obtained are also reviewed. These could be particularly important for creating confidence, from a consumer's perspective, in these architectures. Finally, the paper evaluates the challenges and suggests areas where further research is most urgently required.

The software quality challenges of service oriented architectures in e-commerce

The paper discusses the introduction of Activity Based Learning for professional issues for undergraduate students in the School of Computing and Communications at Southampton Solent University. Its aim is to assist the students with their final year project and future employability. The use of the university's learning environment, based on the Moodle open source software as a key component of the Activity Based Learning, the preparation by the students prior to the tutorials, and the group work within the tutorials are described. The views of the students on this approach are discussed. The paper describes how the students become more self reliant and self motivated in their learning approach. This will be of direct benefit to them in maintaining lifelong learning in their future profession.

Engaging the Students in Activity Based Learning for Future Employability

One of the many approaches to enable businesses and individuals to protect themselves from the ever-increasing amount and range of cybercrime is by education of future computing professionals. This is relevant to students studying different aspects of undergraduate and postgraduate computing. This paper discusses the results of surveys relating to the views of computing undergraduate students on the potential risks of social networking and on other relevant issues. The approaches used to raise this awareness, from first year IT undergraduates to Master students, none of whom are cybercrime or security specialists, are considered. These students specialise in different aspects of computing from business information systems, through software development to networking.

Geoff Staples

Papers

The software quality challenges of service oriented architectures in e-commerce

Engaging the Students in Activity Based Learning for Future Employability

Cybercrime – raising awareness for future professionals