Over the years, many organisations have invested heavily in information systems, changing the way they do business for improvement. Today however, aligning business and information systems is not easily achieved due to rapidly changing business environment. The ability of an organisation to change and change quickly in response to business needs is of paramount concern. This means the current traditional approach of adopting information systems is not suitable. Thus, a need of new paradigm to make business more agile and flexible is undeniable. The new paradigm is that taking a service-oriented architecture initiative as an enabling technology for critical business processes. This review paper has identified a distinctive approach compared to traditional information systems, a generic initiative process as well as the success factors of implementing the service-oriented architecture initiative. Further work is required through case study to obtain insightful understanding on any related issues and challenges in order to build better solutions for such initiative.

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The Internet and the Web continue to evolve at a rapid pace where the Internet as the medium for the Web to provide and share information to global users without boundaries. This has caused the information systems change from standalone desktops to networked systems in order to effectively utilise the Web-specific characteristics for easy access to information anywhere. For this reason, the development of such information systems particularly the ebusiness applications would need to change from traditional development method via software development life cycle to new development methodology through web development life cycle. This new development methodology has been widely used and recognised due to its focus on developing business applications reflecting the nature of the Web. This paper presents a comprehensive review of related literature in which the web development life cycle that considers the unique and special requirements of developing web-based applications with success factors, is more effective compared to the traditional software development. The review findings are taken as a basis for conducting case studies to investigate any issues and challenges from the perspective of web development team.

The focus of many organisations shifts towards a new initiative, specifically service-oriented architecture (SOA). The use of SOA enables high-level application integration and the orchestration of business processes in order to realise its full value, including agility and reusability. This shapes the thinking of architects and developers when it comes leveraging computing and information technology (IT) to model, create, operate and manage business processes as services. However, applying SOA initiatives without considering the quality of information makes it impossible for organisations to succeed. Many researchers have looked at the area of information quality (IQ) in terms of the technical aspects of SOA, but there is a gap in the literature when it comes to the process of implementing and deploying an enterprise-wide SOA as a phased, evolutionary process. Thus, this article discusses the importance of IQ throughout the implementation of SOA initiatives. SOA team members from seven case organisations which have been carrying out SOA initiatives were interviewed to gain in-depth insights into IQ in these firms. The results from these various real-world experiences indicate that tying together these two distinctive areas -SOA initiatives and IQ strategy -has a positive effect for a broader audience.

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