My master-thesis

Title

Practical SOA in danish public federal institutions

Background

According to the Danish e-gov Whitebook of 2003, the kernel of the e-gov work is the selection of SOA, which defines the interoperability between the systems as services. With SOA should the organizations get the best opportunities for connected and continuous it-systems.

The central it-systems of the most Danish federal institutions have a silo-oriented architecture. There are big challenges in using functionality and data across the systems and organizational boundries. The most federal institutions have an EA-programme and many are thinking in starting to work with SOA.

There is no doubt about that there still is much hype about SOA and the concepts are not clear. Few federal institutions have practically worked with SOA driven by important eksternal business drivers and many institutions like my Agency for Governmental Management have still doubt about if they should work with SOA. If they should do so, which approach should they have? How should they start? What are the risks and challenges?

Thesis-problem

"Should the Agency for Governmental Management work with SOA? What should they be aware of? How and where should they start?”

Keywords

SOA - Serviceoriented Architecture, EA - Enterprise Architecture, IT-Governance, SOA-Governance, Topdown, Bottomup, goals, benefits, challanges, strategy, CSFs - Critial Success Factors, e-government, principles, policies, Roadmap, maturity, SOA-proces, Service Portofolio Planning

Thesis-method

Analysis of SOA and the related concepts and their dependencies based on broad literature studies. Case studies in Agency for Govermental Management, Ministry of Food, Agriculture and Fisheries and The Danish federal authority of taxes (SKAT). In depth working with the relationship between EA and SOA and what it means practically for the approach, goals, scope, focus and drivers. Analysis of challenges in SOA and formulization of SOA-CSF´s (with use of SEI´s CSF-Method) based on litterature and cases studies and other CSF-analysis. Modelling of when the CSF´s will be most critical in an organizations SOA-journey. Assesment of maturity and roadmap and service portofolio planning with use of CBDI´s methods.

Download the thesis

Download the thesis-report here and the Appendix here.