Volume 2 No. 1 ISSN 2079-8407 Journal of Emerging Trends in Computing and Information Sciences ©2010-11 CIS Journal. All rights reserved. http://www.cisjournal.org 1 Systems Analysis and Design for Service Oriented Architecture Projects: A Case Study at the Federal Financial Institutions Examinations Council (FFIEC) Chon Abraham College of William & Mary Department of Operations and Information Technology, chon.abraham@business.wm.edu Iris Junglas University of Houston C. T. Bauer College of Business, Department of Decision and Information Sciences Mike Willis CPA, PricewaterhouseCoopers, XBRL International, Founding Co-Chairperson Tampa, Florida ABSTRACT Problems with consolidating, disseminating, and ensuring integrity of corporate data management continues to confront the information systems leadership in organizations. To address these problems some organizations are employing Service Oriented Architectures (SOA) as a paradigm, which is enhanced by the use of Web services to provide a lightweight means of leveraging resources. The Federal Financial Institutions Examinations Council (FFIEC) is one such organization. In this paper, we have used the traditional systems analysis and design (SAD) principles to frame how the FFIEC employed SOA as a new paradigm of conducting business with Web services enabled by a particular XML based instantiation: eXtensible Business Reporting Language (XBRL). Using qualitative methods, we provide a methodological guide in the form of questions organizations should address in SOA projects that particularizes SAD principles for SOA. The questions derive from merging analysis of the data collected regarding the SAD efforts at the FFIEC coupled with principles asserted in traditional SAD literature. We also present lessons learned by the FFIEC while progressing through the planning, analysis, design, and implementation phases to achieve quality and flexibility in its information supply chain. Keywords: Service-oriented architectures (SOA), Systems Analysis and Design (SAD), XBRL, information supply chain 1. INTRODUCTION Service oriented architectures (SOA) and Web Services projects are typically undertaken to bring changes in processes to overcome problems associated with corporate data management, communicating and institutionalizing standards. IS leadership is therefore striving for flexible, yet parsimonious, ways of overcoming these information management and delivery problems. The leadership also seeks more effective planning for just-in-time services that enable rapid deployment of IS across the enterprise for which SOA is particularly useful [1]. Organizations are employing SOA with Web services to bring about increased business efficiency [2], [3],[4],[5].The concept of SOA surfaced over 10 years ago with a description of a utopian state of enterprise flexibility in information delivery and software development [6]. Nowadays, Internet-based technologies and protocols have matured to make SOA a reality [1]. However, there is still surmountable ambiguity as to its definition and components [7]. One prominent misconception is that SOA is interchangeable with Web services. Web services are self-contained, platform-independent, XML-based implementations of specific business processes that can be consumed and reused by various applications and systems. They provide services, such as delivering the most up to date inventory levels to various supply chain applications that need to use the information to complete their portions of a business process. In this manner processes for Web services are independent and typically do not depend on the state of other Web services. SOA, on the other hand, can simply represent the architectural framework or method that affords information exchange between disparate, distributed systems [8]. It is also a term used to describe the architectural style for building software applications that use Web services across a network [9]. As a result of the confusion of what SOA is there is also confusion as to how to create SOA or why an organization even should employ SOA [2]. Web services are becoming more commonplace as an instrument to disseminate and consume corporate data [10]. However, having Web services does not necessarily imply that an organization is employing SOA. SOA is not equivalent to a collection of Web services that organizations employ— even though some make this claim [9]. Minimal benefit is derived from simply having