Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) has been widely and quickly adopted in different organizations during recent years. SOA enables to solve integration complexity problem and facilitates broad-scale interoperability and unlimited collaboration across the organization. This paper demonstrates how SOA is important in business organizations based on a proposed architecture diagram. A case study is also presented where the functionality of the proposed SOA is implemented in a business organization.

Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) is generally defined as a business architectural approach that supports integrating businesses as linked, repeatable business tasks or services (Youngkon, 2009). It mainly aims to build a platform-and-language-independent technical layer based on various platforms. Business Process Management (BPM) is a systematic approach for improving an organization’s business processes. BPM activities seek to make business processes more effective, more efficient and more capable of adapting to an ever-changing environment. Today’s important challenge in business is integrating and interfacing new solutions with legacy applications. These applications use different technologies and platforms, and tight couplings exist between the BPM layers. Managing tight couplings and integrations under the environment constantly changes the business processes. Due to tight coupling, the organizations are affected with operational costs, increased time to restore services and loss of business. Service orientation aims at loosely coupled services to support the requirements of business processes and users.

The layered architecture depicted in Figure 1 aims to solve the communication problem between business processes, business services and technology. The architecture uses a separate services layer as an intermediate between business drivers and technical implementation. The architecture shows how corporate missions and strategies can be mapped onto business and supporting services.

The proposed architecture is divided into seven layers to improve the efficiency of an organization. The architecture shown in Figure 1 depicts the relationship between the business processes in an organization and an SOA.

Computer Sciences Journal, Business Organization, Service-Oriented Architecture, Business Process Management, Legacy Applications, Service Orientation, Technical Implementation, Corporate Missions, Corporate Strategies, Business Processes, Application Services, ERP Systems, Software Components, Multiple Application Interfaces.