Services-based Integration of Urbanized Information Systems: Foundations and Governance

Information systems urbanization has been proposed by many academics and practitioners to facilitate building agile information systems needed by modern organizations to take into account continuous change and overcoming problems induced by external pressures. Nevertheless, as stressed by many authors, integration of urbanized information systems is among the most important challenges faced by organizations. Indeed, urbanized information systems of modern organizations are composed of an important number of applications available for almost every business domain which behave as islands of processing systems either within organizations or across organizations boundaries. Accordingly, they involve high costs and long time to provide consistent information needed by organizations. The integration of an urbanized information system consists in the governance of the relationships between its components (applications, software systems layers, components, etc.). Starting from the 5+1 architecture model of urbanized applications, there are three categories of information systems integration: data-based integration, process-based integration, and service-based integration. In this paper, the authors focus on the third category and analyze the contribution of services to urbanized information systems integration. In particular, they demonstrate that the dependencies between applications belonging to an urbanized information system are based on exchanges of reusable public applicative services. Moreover, they highlight the role played by such services in the integration of urbanized information systems and underline that the effectiveness of reusable public services as instruments of information system integration requires the governance of these services.