The service-oriented enterprise

Today's organizations are changing with respect to both structure and internal working processes. As a consequence of trends such as globalization, deregulation and highly volatile markets, corporations are forced to increase their responsiveness to temporary requirements or business opportunities. Most existing organizational theories do not apply to the emerging sort of enterprise which incorporates principles such as structural decentralization, loose coupling of autonomously acting business units as well as complexity hiding on the basis of uniform interfaces. This work briefly elaborates on the concept of Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) in the field of information technology and proposes a first approach to mapping its major underlying principles to upcoming forms of organizations. We present a model of the Service-Oriented Enterprise (SOE) and leverage use cases of existing companies as well as recent theoretical approaches to demonstrate the analogy between state-of-the-art paradigms in the fields of both technology and organizational theory.