Service-Oriented Architecture in Higher Education

Service orientation has become an accepted concept in how information systems should be exposed and coordinated in higher education. It is important that the learning environments of students and the working conditions of teachers can be planned to provide them appropriate and flexible information systems, data networks, and databases. Appropriate information and communication technology (ICT) tools enable efficient cooperation in networks in a way that they can promote the high quality learning. The service-oriented architecture (SOA) is the planning method of information systems that uses loosely coupled services to support the requirements of business processes and users. Resources on a network in an SOA environment are made available as independent services that can be accessed without knowledge of their underlying platform implementation (Wikipedia, 2007). The approach is cost-efficient and flexible because it consists of various replaceable applications. The purpose of this article is to present the framework of the SOA to analyse the service structure in the networked and virtual working environments in higher education. The approach developed in this article is planned to be generic so that it can be applied to various kinds of organisations and networks for the analysis and management of services. This approach helps an organisation to reengineer the architecture of ICT environments. The architecture is useful for the planning of networked learning community. This article is intended for managers and other experts who may wish to familiarise with the benefits and opportunities provided by the SOA. The empirical context of this article is the Turku University of Applied Sciences (TUAS) and other Finnish profession-oriented higher education institutions. The TUAS is a multidisciplinary higher education institution founded in 1992. The institution has 9,500 degree students and 800 full-time employees. The TUAS has six faculties and a Continuing Education Centre. ICT is an important field of education and it is mixed with the business, biotechnology, mechanical engineering, health care, performing arts, communication, and many other subjects. The cooperation between the 28 Finnish universities of applied sciences is active. This article is organised as follows: First the background section introduces the concepts and characteristics of the SOA. The main attention of the article is focused on the information system project of the Finnish universities of applied sciences. Thereafter, some future trends are presented, and the results of the article are summarized in the concluding section.