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Various forms of IT sourcing used by audit clients create issues of concern for external auditors. This article investigates the nature and basic characteristics of service‐oriented architecture (SOA), a modern information system architecture strategy, to ascertain whether the use of SOA by a service consumer audit client would have an impact on the activities typically performed by the external auditor. It was found that SOA presents a complete shift in the way IT application functionality is constructed and integrated and inevitably effects changes in the accounting system and the related internal controls of the SOA service consumer. As a result SOA has a significant impact on the activities performed during the audit process and introduces various SOA‐related aspects that need to be considered by the external auditor of a SOA service consumer.

Many service-oriented software engineering (SOSE) methods from industry and academia claim their compliance with SOA and SO, but there is a lack of framework to assess the existing methods or to provide new ones. First, the paper questions: (Q1) to what extent an approach would consider the three aspect: service, composition, and management to deliver software solutions that are conformed to SO and SOA principles; (Q2) to what extent an approach would consider the aggregates of a method, including representation techniques, assisting tools, and inspection techniques to assess the delivered solution (service and composition), in addition to the process; and (Q3) to what extent an approach would consider the alignment of business and IT through the application of model-driven development by using standards such as model-driven architecture. Then, the paper compares four generic approaches: top-down, bottom-up, green-field, and meet-in-the-middle, within a framework, to highlight their strengths and weaknesses. Finally, the paper aims to propose a business-oriented approach that focuses on the value a business can add to its customers, whereby the value must be specified in a contract to be largely re-used.

This work develops a framework as an abstract model for SOSE generic methods. Then, it uses the framework as an analytical study to compare the generic methods and come up with research issues and a new method for SOSE.

A set of guidelines that a SOSE method develops should consider when selecting or developing a new method.

Comparison of existing SOSE methods within the findings of the proposed framework. The paper has theoretical implications as the open issues provide a research roadmap towards the realization of SOA in accordance with a maturity model.

This has practical implications as it: provides a better understanding of the approaches, as they are ambiguously used by the existing methods; and assists developers in deciding an approach having the necessary knowledge related to its process, strengths and weaknesses.

None of the existing comparison framework has raised the level of abstraction up to generic methods such as top-down, green-filed, meet-in-the-middle and bottom-up.

To carry out a practical experiment into the feasibility of service orientation to achieve a dynamic, late‐binding service architecture.

Literature view to provide a foundation in standards and measure anecdotal opinion regarding service orientation. The review informed an architectural design based on real world requirements from a multinational mobile telecommunications organisation moving toward portal‐based services. The architectural implementation took place in a lab‐based setting and tested with third‐party services that were integrated into the architecture dynamically to test the late bound requirements of the infrastructure. The experimental approach also enabled the testing of the opinions formed regarding service orientation.

The main outcome of the study related to the open, standards‐based nature purported to be possible with service orientation. The findings on the study highlighted some major problems in interoperability and operational efficiency of service‐oriented technologies when applied to a complex architecture framework.

Currently this represents the findings of a single study based on a specific set of requirements. In order to generalise, further study is needed and currently ongoing.

The study has high implications for people wishing to approach service orientation as a means to integrate both new and legacy systems. The work raises a lot of questions about the supposed ease of integration.

The work contributes to a growing body of work examining and evaluating the usefulness of service orientation.

Digital transformation has been changing the economic environment of enterprises in recent years. To remain competitive, they rely on an extensible software architecture, flexible workflow execution, and automated decision management. The concepts of service-oriented architectures (SOA), business process management (BPM), and business rules management (BRM) provide an adequate, yet isolated means of addressing many of these requirements. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

This study adapts from established research frameworks to structure the current state of research on the integration of SOA, BPM and BRM. The authors highlight the current research scope, point to disregarded topics and sketch out multidisciplinary research approaches.

While the three concepts are often discussed only in isolation or pairwise, approaches that integrate them are scarce. Against this backdrop, this study defines three types of research opportunities and identifies several directions for future research that should be explored from a technological as well as organizational perspective. Given the breadth of open questions, the authors present sources for each area of our research framework, which can serve as starting points for future investigations.

Except for well-established support for separate tasks and technologies, there is a lack of integrated standards, methods and platforms, which for example enable integrated decision-making across BPM and SOA.

Our contribution builds on established frameworks and clearly shows that the discussion on the integration of SOA, BPM and BRM cannot yet be regarded as sufficient. The research agenda highlights which areas explicitly benefit from a more precise consideration.

The paper aims to study realization requirements for the flexible enactment of artifact-centric business processes in a dynamic, collaborative environment and to develop a workflow execution framework that can effectively address those requirements.

This study proposed a framework and contract-based, event-driven architecture design and implementation that can directly realize collaborative artifact-centric business processes in service-oriented architecture (SOA) without any model conversion.

The results show that the approach is feasible in presenting several key benefits over the use of existing workflow systems to run artifact-centric processes.

Most of the existing approaches require an artifact-centric model to be transformed into executable workflow languages to run on existing workflow management systems. This study argues that the model conversion can incur losses of information and affect traceability and monitoring ability of workflows, especially in an SOA where a workflow can span across multiple inter-business entities.

The purpose of this paper is to propose a re‐orientation of the way the concept of sustainability is dealt with in relation to information systems, positioning human behaviour and the processing of knowledge at the centre of the concept.

The concept of sustainability of knowledge (SoK), which refers to processes that govern knowledge, is employed to define sustainable information systems (SIS). Following this definition, knowledge aspects are employed to tackle the notion of sustainability. The sustainability approach presented in this paper is then translated into requirements needed for designing a SIS.

Three knowledge aspects are found to be relevant for the design of SIS: adaptability, offloading and knowledge evaluation. The service oriented‐based architecture (SOA) seems to be appropriate to support the proposed approach.

The conceptual approach proposed need to be evaluated by case studies to be performed in different organizations.

A knowledge based perspective is proposed to re‐orient the notion of sustainability. Moreover, an SOA architecture is used to design a system based on the proposed approach.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate service-oriented architecture organizational studies (SOA OS) in healthcare through a rigorous literature review, development and testing in an eGovernment health-care setting. The application of SOA paradigm to integrate information systems has been pursued mainly by private organizations. However, SOA starts to appear in the public agenda and specifically in health-care reengineering, as well. Recently, government strategies for eHealth have been slowly incorporating the SOA paradigm to integrate isolated systems, provide cost-effective solutions and expand the capabilities of their health-care information system. Yet, literature indicates that eHealth government strategies, including SOA, require the support of SOA OS to be successfully implemented.

To investigate the less acknowledged phenomena like SOA OS in healthcare, the authors incorporate an interpretive, qualitative case study approach to conduct this research. This method will assist in examining the phenomenon in its natural setting, examine the in-depth complexities and health-care processes and provide rich qualitative data during interviews and observations.

The authors critically review the literature and synthesize a SOA OS with specific attributes, sub-elements, guidelines and healthcare-specific parameters. This conceptual structure was tested in the practical arena leading to an evaluated SOA OS blueprint.

As the outcome of the research was based on a single case, the paper concludes that the SOA OS in health-care research needs to broaden its perspective with more empirical data.

This research revealed empirical insights that can help practitioners and researchers focus their attention to the significant role that the SOA OS plays during SOA implementations.

This paper focuses on critical success factors related to SOA implementations in health-care organizations and can be considered as novel as it identifies and structures a SOA OS element that can be part of a SOA governance approach in the area of healthcare.

Service oriented architecture (SOA) is increasingly adopted by many sectors, including healthcare. Due to the nature of healthcare systems, there is a need to increase SOA adoption success rates as the non‐integrated nature of healthcare systems is responsible for medical errors that cause the loss of tens of thousands of patients per year. Although numerous factors affect SOA success, these have not been explored and analysed yet, especially in the area of healthcare. This highlights a literature void and thus the purpose of this paper is to identify critical success factors (CSFs) influencing SOA implementation in healthcare.

The authors critically review the literature and identify individual factors that may form CSFs for SOA implementation in healthcare. In doing so, they synthesise and propose a conceptual model of SOA CSFs in healthcare. The conceptual model is tested in the practical arena using a qualitative research methodology that is based on a case study strategy.

The empirical findings verify the proposed model and reveal that an additional SOA CSF in healthcare does exist. It is also revealed that the proposed model helped the case organization to successfully implement an SOA solution.

The implications that derive from this article are important for both theory and practice. At a practical level, the paper delivers a model that can be used as a decision‐making tool by professionals when they implement SOA solutions in healthcare. At a theoretical level, the proposed model extends the body of knowledge on this area and opens new avenues for research. From another point of view, it is suggested that further research is required on this area as the proposed conceptual model was tested only through a single case study. Thus, multiple case studies or other types of research strategies should be used to better test the proposed model.

This work is original and focuses on CSFs related to SOA implementations in healthcare organizations. The work can be considered as novel as it identifies and classifies SOA CSFs for solutions that have been developed in the area of healthcare.

In order to implement Service‐Oriented Architecture (SOA) in the telecommunication providers' Operations Support System (OSS) domain, this paper aims to propose an architectural baseline to design and implement the SOA based OSS model.

The paper proposes an approach to SOA using Web services for the service delivery domain in the area of telecommunication OSS design and implementation. The paper defines the operational activities needed to serve customers, rearrange these activities to support autonomous services, and designs a systemic process that is composed of numerous services. The new OSS is implemented for wireless LAN services delivery process. In order to realize this SOA based OSS, the interfaces of these well‐defined services are described and each service is implemented within its own boundaries. Services can be orchestrated with a composite objective, so that operational expenditures for new business objectives can be reduced.

The paper finds that, through the implementation of the SOA‐based OSS platform, business agility can be achieved in rapidly changing market circumstances.

The paper shows that in the move towards service‐oriented computing, Service‐Oriented Architecture provides flexible, cost‐effective operations support solutions through interoperability, reusability and composability between loosely coupled services.

Due to the convergence of rapid business developments and digitization challenges, service orientation is back on the research agenda as a concept to improve firms’ business services. Yet, little is known about the type of determinants that are relevant and to what degree they affect a firm’s service-oriented strategy.

Building on structural equation modeling (SEM) and a unique data set of 131 international firms from different continents, the authors identify and analyze the key determinants in the context of a firm’s service-oriented strategy.

The findings show that in order to cater for changes, organizations have to manage and adapt the coherence of the determinants’ business services, business processes and knowledge sharing continuously. Moreover, the results show that a service-oriented strategy is not only influenced by business services as such, but business services mediate the relationships between business processes, governance and process-aware information systems to a service-oriented strategy.

A limitation is imposed by the limited sample size and the unbalanced response of participants (executive management). In future research, a more extensive survey among a broader group of participants will help the authors to develop their model further in order to generalize the results, as well as more finely grained research related to geography and size might be pursued. Future empirical research is necessary to identify and test the relationships between other constructs and study their effect on a firm’s service-oriented strategy.

On a practical level, the authors postulate that an organization’s executive management should pay attention to invest in an organizational entity (department) that manages business services continuously. This organizational entity has to ensure that related processes and knowledge sharing are in place to establish and maintain a service-oriented strategy.

This research contributes to service-oriented literature by operationalizing the implementation of an organization’s service-oriented strategy. The authors’ insights go beyond the findings of Aier et al. (2011). The authors found that a service-oriented strategy influences service-oriented project success positively. The authors extended these findings, based on a unique data set, by studying business services and influencing determinants (i.e. business processes, governance, PAIS and knowledge sharing) within the context of service orientation. The renewed attention to the concept of service orientation provides insights into critical determinants that influence the implementation of a service-oriented strategy.