An Identification of Non-Technical Issues in SOEA Implementation

Today’s business environment pushes organizations to be adaptive and collaborative. This push drives the development of service-oriented enterprise architecture (SOEA) in support of the organization. To realise the advantages offered by SOEA, research on avoiding SOEA implementation failure is of considerable merit. In the review of literature on SOEA implementation failure, two research problems were identified: first, there is a paucity of research on non-technical issues (NTIs) in SOEA implementation; and second, the definition of an NTI in the Information Systems (IS) field remains implicit, incomplete, and incongruent. Addressing these two research problems therefore becomes the research objective of this paper. The overarching research design framework is qualitative, mixed-method research. Under the guidance of this framework, literature reviews, semi-structured interviews, and an online survey were conducted. The key findings are a clarified scope for NTIs in the field of IS and the identification of the critical NTIs in SOEA implementation.