Towards SOA implementation complexity measurement enlightened by organization theory

When implementing information infrastructures to support business, Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) based systems are inevitably more complex than traditional architecture based systems. Therefore, it is essential to measure the implementation complexity to avoid development that is unworthy of adopting SOA. However, there is little work that covers the SOA implementation complexity measurement with comprehensive analysis. By adopting existing work related to organizational complexity, this paper proposes a framework for comprehending and measuring the organizational complexity of SOA implementation, which comprises four dimensions: Structure, Environment, Business and Resource. Along each dimension, some SOA-compatible metrics have been extracted from the corresponding research on organizational complexity. More importantly, this proposed framework can be used for future work in proposing metrics for integrally and quantitatively calculating the complexity of implementing SOA. © 2010 ACM.