Description
Service-oriented architectures offer promising means to flexibly organize business processes. At the same time, new challenges for management arise in order to realize these potentials. Given the technological opportunities, these challenges essentially lie in choosing the right mix of services on the basis of an appropriate infrastructure supporting value adding activities. In order to support this management perspective, a focus on service-oriented business processes is suggested in this article. Hence, a shift from technical aspects of designing service-oriented information systems to economic aspects of using them according to business needs is drawn. For this purpose, findings on the evaluation of financial performance of service-oriented business processes are presented in this paper. The objective is to develop a measurement system for decision support on the con-figuration of a company’s service portfolio reflecting specific economic conditions relevant in a certain situation. Following a design science approach, general principles of a measurement system are worked out and structured in a comprehensive framework. Then, the application of a corresponding system is presented with a practical study. Finally, perspectives on the specification and implementation of the system are sketched.