Using Service-Oriented Architecture to Navigate the COVID-19 Pandemic for Knowledge-Based SMEs
By Harrison Thompson, Alex Whitehead, Yixin Lan, Fangfang Jia and Fen Qin
Introduction
The COVID-19 pandemic has presented both government and business with many challenges, not least of which has been how to enable people to continue working, and keeping the economy ticking over, whilst remaining physically isolated to reduce the risk of spreading the virus. Particularly hard-hit are small to medium enterprises (SMEs) who typically don’t have a large IT infrastructure capable of maintaining normal operations remotely.
In this paper, students from the University of Melbourne examine the potential for a service-oriented architecture (SOA) to help businesses, in particular SMEs, to adapt quickly to a disaster scenario such as the COVID-19 pandemic. The case study of a fictitious legal practice highlights the issues faced in such a scenario, how a SOA can help to facilitate remote delivery of business services, and the many challenges faced in implementing such an architecture. Management and governance of the architecture are also discussed, including the application of TOGAF® and ITIL® to ensure effective implementation.
Acknowledgement
The paper has been created under the supervision of Dr Rod Dilnutt, School of Computing and Information Systems, The University of Melbourne.
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Well-written and timely, this paper is presented at a high-level in terms of its recommendation of better use of SOA given the challenges of delivering value with agility in the COVID-19 world. I think a follow-on paper to this could further develop what other alternatives there are and what configurations could be considered, especially as we think more about microservices and APIs. I think more elaboration about related architecture principles and patterns would be useful.