Rapidly changing supply chain requires more flexible and efficient information systems. However, large investment and long lasting system design and development period often makes it difficult to leverage information systems to meet supply chain requirements. This often impedes the effort to deploy information system in fulfilling business strategy. Sharing distributed IT resources across the boundary of organizations is a feasible way for enterprises to construct supply chain management systems quickly and economically, especially for small or intermediate enterprises. Service-oriented Architecture enables the sharing of IT resources in a wider area and scope, and provides a promising paradigm in information systems design. In this paper, we investigate inter-organizational resources sharing based on SOA. We first analyzes the requirements of IT resources sharing and critical SOA features that are suitable for building resources sharing regime, then propose a SOA model for inter-organizational resources sharing. We analyze thoroughly the SOA based information system architecture and mechanics of IT resources sharing across a supply chain. Finally, we discuss some important strategic issues in deploying SOA in resources sharing.
Author(s): Minglun Ren; Xiaoying Ao; Hongxiang Wang