A Predictive Business Agility Model for Service Oriented Architectures

Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) is now considered a mainstream option for delivering solutions which promise business agility benefits. Unfortunately, there is currently no quantitative approach for predicting the expected agility of a SOA system under development. In this paper we present an empirically validated Predicted Business Agility Index (PBAI) which is designed to measure the expected business agility of a SOA deployment. The PBAI is constructed through statistically analyzing the relationship between 150 technical attributes and the attainment of business agility in 39 SOA deployments. 37 of the technical attributes, classified into three areas of architecture, business process management, and impact analysis are determined to be the primary contributors to achieving business agility. The PBAI is evaluated using a leave-one-out cross validation experiment of the SOA projects in our study, and is shown to be highly correlated with attained business agility.