Service Orient or Be Doomed!

How Service Orientation Will Change Your Business

Jason Bloomberg, Ronald Schmelzer

Publisher: Wiley, 2006, 258 pages

ISBN: 0-471-76858-8

Keywords: Information Systems

Last modified: May 1, 2019, 11:10 a.m.

A company's failure to innovate sends customers to other businesses that provide better value and vonvenience. Today's companies need a go-to-resource that will help them maximize their use of information technology (IT) and understand it for what it is: an integral resource upon which business productivity, profitability, and efficiency depend if expected to succeed.

Introducing service orientation as a vision and philosophy that can impact a business, this innovative new book equips the reader to:

  • Best use technology resources to meet goals
  • Unleash their "inner nerd" to embrace IT as part of their business as a whole
  • Address the "mother of all business problems": inflexibility
  • Know the technological factors that pressure a business to innovate
  • Understand buzzwords with Jargon Watch sidebars

Conversational in style and alternately irreverent, humorous, and intelligent in tone, authors Jason Bloomberg and Ronald Schmelzer — senior analysts for highly respected IT advisory and analysis firm ZapThink — offer a magna carta to CEO and small business owner alike that erases the line between business and technology toward a new service-oriented approach.

  1. The Business Inflexibility Trap
    • The Mother Of All Business Problems
    • One Constant Is Change
    • Compliance Conundrum
    • Need For Business Agility
  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?
  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
  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?
  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?
  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
  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?
  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
  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
  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
  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
  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?