Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) and Arcor SAIC

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Question 1
Organizational business process management are essential for sustainable competitive advantage. Discuss what and how SOA and other technologies can be used for Arcor SAIC’s knowledge management, process coordination and decision-making. Provide examples to support your discussion.
* Knowledge management, process coordination, and decision-making can be sources of competitive advantage for organizations. In this question, I will demonstrate with examples how Arcor SAIC can utilize SOA and other technologies to enhance knowledge management, process coordination, and decision-making.
* In the case of Arcor SAIC, SOA was deployed with the use of the Oracle SOA suite to facilitate the integration of solutions of Oracle and other providers in an effort to simplify IT infrastructure administration.
* SOA can enhance Arcor SAIC's competitive advantage by improving its knowledge management. According to ITIL Foundation (2019), knowledge management offers an organization a structured approach that helps define, build, re-use, and share knowledge. As learned from the lectures, SOA comprises messages that form communication units between service handlers (Dilnu et al., 2022). In addition, SOA is made up of operations that exchange messages to enable the performance of work. Therefore, with service handlers communicating through messages, SOA can offer Arcor SAIC an effective knowledge management system that can enhance the firm’s competitiveness. With the company selling its products in 120 countries worldwide, SOA can speed up access to valuable knowledge and information.
* SOA can also be integral in boosting process coordination in the company. A major feature of SOA is the operations that exchange messages to facilitate work performance (Dilnu et al., 2022). In addition, operations can be invoked by process instances to complete automated work. In the case of Arcor SAIC, through SOA, the company can have services that respond to messages from different sources. For example, the manufacturing service in the company can respond to sales and marketing service to ensure that production is done in accordance with the demand in the market.
* SOA can also be useful in decision-making activities for Arcor SAIC, which can further boost its competitive advantage. With better information flow between different units and departments, the speed and quality of decision-making can significantly improve within the company. In this case, significant decisions impacting operations and profitability can be facilitated with an SOA. For example, the company may shift production from one manufacturing plant to another where it has a cost advantage.
* Other technologies, such as enterprise systems, can also be instrumental in improving the operations of Arcor SAIC. In the case of Arcor SAIC, enterprise systems can help in the integration of the company's major business processes into a single software system that ensures a seamless flow of information throughout the organization.
* The interoperability, composability, and re-use that characterizes SOA (Dilnu et al., 2022) can further help Arcor SAIC to cement its position as a leading producer of sweets.
Question 3
What were the drivers that encouraged Arcor SAIC to adopt SOA as the basis of its ICT infrastructure in this project? Based on information provided in the case study, discuss the extent to which the challenges facing Arcor SAIC were resolved by the adoption of SOA in this project.
The achievement of high levels of interoperability is a key requirement of enterprise wide systems.
How was interoperability achieved for Arcor SAIC?
* Several factors often prompt an organization to adopt a new system. In this question, I intend to show the features of the SOA that influenced its adoption in the company.
* Drivers
Drivers

Evidence

Discussion

Re-usable

As Arcor SAIC moved from its classic IT model, it sought to create a reliable and scalable IT infrastructure (Arcor SAIC, n.d.).

Re-usability is a major feature of SOA that drove Arcor SAIC to adopt it. The company needed an architecture that supports service re-use even if there was no immediate opportunity to do so. The need for a reliable and scalable IT infrastructure shows that the company needed an IT infrastructure to support changing business requirements. With a re-usable IT infrastructure, the operations of the company can be flexible depending on the market environment.

Composable

The Demantra Demand Management Managed Cloud Service and Demantra Predictive Trade Planning Managed Cloud Service allowed Arcor SAIC to develop product demand forecasting.

As noted by Dilnu et al. (2022), alongside re-use, composability plays an important role in the restructuring of component services and systems. Arcor SAIC needed an IT infrastructure that would allow the implementation of sophisticated and complex operations to help achieve business goals. With SOA services allowing the company to develop a product demand forecasting mechanism, its business processes improved significantly. The case shows that the company can now predict monthly and annual demand for its products....