The SOA platform for small businesses: a conceptual framework

Abstract

The ever expanding service economy presents small businesses with unique challenges as well as new opportunities. Due to high development and maintenance costs, a sophisticated IT infrastructure is difficult to attain by small businesses. Through assessment of real-world use-cases, we have identified managerial and informational challenges facing small businesses. Moreover, from a synthesis of a single use-case, we propose an on-demand delivery of IT services to small businesses, the nature of which transcends both organisational and geographical boundaries. Our proposed on-demand IT services system involves a service-oriented architecture (SOA), which is structured to align business processes and information technology/systems. Moreover, our proposed SOA approach is supported by two underlying technologies: virtualisation and application service provider (ASP). The net result of our approach is one that offers small businesses access to a sophisticated IT infrastructure that might otherwise be unattainable. We conclude this paper with managerial implications and future research.