The adoption of web services based architectures in Australian organisations : an exploratory study

This exploratory research study contributes to answering two related research questions. First it identifies the key influences that seem to be driving and constraining the adoption of Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) and XML/Web Services and secondly it adduces some evidence to confirm that these influences significantly differ from those found by IS researchers in the adoption of other innovations in organisations. The key drivers were found to include improved agility, reuse and [open standards enabled] interoperability. None of these map easily to factors identified in previous Diffusion of Innovations (DOI) related IS research. In spite of standards being originally seen as strengths, it was found that the lack of IT industry agreement on the next generation of Web Services standards is now emerging as a perceived constraint. Variants of the ‘network effect’ such as partner push and client drag were also found to be influential.