The strategic value of SOA: a comparative case study in the banking sector

Abstract

Information and Communication Technology (ICT) has helped to drive increasingly intense global competition. In turn, this intensity increases the need for flexibility and rapid changeability in ICT to support strategies that depend on organisational agility. We report a comparative, cross-cultural case study of the implementation of Service-Oriented Architectures (SOA) at a Scandinavian bank and a Swiss bank. The strategic rewards in the adoption of SOA appear to go beyond marketplace issues of ICT capability acquisition, and unexpectedly arise in the creation of an extensible organisational ICT architecture. The extensibility of the ICT architecture that results from the adoption of SOA provides potential for greater organisational agility (and thereby competitiveness).