Service Orient

How Service Orientation Will Change Your Business

"The real value of this book is that it makes SOA and Web services, which are critical and business-transforming, crystal-clear to the layman, both business and IT leaders. The book stays focused on the real-world issues facing business and government institutions today. In an industry full of experts of many stripes, Ron and Jason are the real thing: savvy, experienced, and realistic. They have produced a must-read book for management."
--Paul Lipton, Senior Architect, Unicenter Web Services and Application Management Computer Associates

"This is by far the finest publication on SOA of our time. From cover to back, Service Orient or Be Doomed! strips away the layers of confusion most IT stakeholders face when confronted with enterprise architecture, and illustrates pragmatic and practical paths towards a sustainable and efficient enterprise architecture. Both the technically savvy and the bean counters will enjoy this book that speaks to the critical points they need to understand."
--Duane A. Nickull Senior Standards Strategist, Adobe Systems, Inc. Chair, OASIS SOA Reference Model Technical Committee Vice chair, United Nations CEFACT (UN/CEFACT)

"If you're looking for a guide that's based on reality, this is it. These guys know how you can service-orient your enterprise and have the best chance of success. This book is the best SOA tool you can buy. I'm recommending it to everyone."
--Dave Linthicum, CEO, BRIDGEWERX

"Jason and Ron are experts on Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) and have written the first book that is aimed at helping a nontechnical businessperson understand why the SOA computing revolution is critical to business. Rather than provide a nerdy death via buzzword book, Jason and Ron take a humorous, clever, and insightful romp through this new technology and how it impacts business in general."
--Brad Feld, Mobius Venture Capital

Authors Jason Bloomberg and Ronald Schmelzer--senior analysts for highly respected IT advisory and analysis firm ZapThink--say it all in the title of their new book, Service Orient or Be Doomed! : How Service Orientation Will Change Your Business. That is, if you fail to service orient your company, you will fail in competing with the organizations that do.

This provocative new book takes service orientation out of its more familiar technological surroundings within service-oriented architecture and introduces it as a philosophy that advocates its rightful place within a business context, redefining it as a new way of thinking about organizing your business and its processes.

Informal, challenging, and intelligent in style, Service Orient or Be Doomed! : How Service Orientation Will Change Your Business shows you how you can best use technology resources to meet your company's business goals and empower your company to go from "stuck" to "competitive."

Preface. CHAPTER 1: The Business Inflexibility Trap.
The Mother of All Business Problems.
One Constant Is Change.
Compliance Conundrum.
Need for Business Agility.
CHAPTER 2: If You're in a Hole, the First Thing to Do Is Stop Digging.
IT Decision Making's Fatal Flaw.
The IT "Rat's Nest".
Why Are the Nerds Sitting at Their Own Table?
CHAPTER 3: What Really Happened to eBusiness.
eBusiness was a Great Idea, so What Happened?
eBusiness Is Dead! Long Live eBusiness!
How to Think like an eBusinessperson.
Why Aren't the Systems Integrators Helping Anymore?
Thrift: Get Used to It.
CHAPTER 4: What Do You Want Your IT to Do, Anyway?
Everyone's a Grandma.
Middleware: Part of the Solution or Part of the Problem?
Automation Paradox.
Business Process: Sweetness and Light or Evil Hellspawn?
Missing Link in the IT Chain.
Who's in Control of IT Anyway?
CHAPTER 5: The Secret Sauce: Loose Coupling.
Tale of Distributed Computing.
Power of Abstraction.
Role of Open Standards.
Running IT Like a Railroad.
How to Think Loosely Coupled.
Secret of the Best Ice Skaters.
How Loose Is Your Coupling?
CHAPTER 6: Service Orientation: Light at the End of the Tunnel.
What's a Service, Anyway?
Services + Loose Coupling = Agility.
Process This!
How Service-Oriented Process Replaces Traditional Integration.
CHAPTER 7: Is There an Architect in the House?
New Discipline of Architecture.
Just How Big Is the Big Picture?
Putting All the Pieces Together.
Where Are the Architects?
Whither the IT Department?
CHAPTER 8: How to Think Service Oriented.
When Not to Use Service-Oriented Architecture.
Keeping Up with the Competition.
Service Orientation for Big Fish.
Service Orientation for Small Fish.
SOA to Stay Out of Jail.
SOA for User Empowerment.
SOA for Value Chains.
CHAPTER 9: Okay, So Where Do We Start?
Identifying the Problem.
Choosing Your Battles.
Top-Down Planning and Bottom-Up Planning.
Closer Look at Process Decomposition.
Find Your Champion.
CHAPTER 10: Tackling the Inertia in the Organization.
Selling Service Orientation to Your Boss, Team, and Company.
Quantifying the Cost and the Return on the Service Orientation Investment.
Money, Money, Money: Where Will It Come from to Pay for SOA?
Reaching the SOA Tipping Point.
Return of the Luddites.
New Service-Oriented Organization.
CHAPTER 11: Build Agility with Agility.
Death to the Software Development Lifecycle!
Lego Block Model of Service Orientation.
Four Pillars of Service-Oriented Development.
Not Your Parents' Requirements Gathering.
Build, Buy, or Repurpose?
Reuse: The Holy Grail of IT.
CHAPTER 12: Becoming a Service-Oriented Enterprise.
Making IT Matter.
Building Metaprocesses.
Connecting the Dots: Service Orientation, Outsourcing, and the Industrialization of IT.
Sunset of Legacy.
Vision of the Business Web.
What Does It All Mean?
Index.