Early service discovery in small business ecosystems: A pilot study

Currently, SOA is partially adopted as a conceptual business paradigm other than an IT architectural approach as it was originated. Enterprises now have increasing opportunities to develop service-centric systems cooperatively. However, autonomous members working in a team as business partners raise new challenges to SOA adoption. In this position paper, we analyze common barriers to effective SOA adoption when heavy cross-organization collaboration taking place, especially in the fuzzy front-end of development. In such kind of alliances, which are defined as small business ecosystems in our work, service identification/ migration approaches applied to large scale enterprise information system are not suitable any more. To stimulate further research on SOA adoption in small business ecosystems, two projects adopting different service discovery and alignment approaches to build up overall solution architecture are introduced. One collects service descriptions from partners and the other combines independent service providers. By analyzing pros and cons and sketching further improvements, our preliminary idea on early service discovery are summarized.