Service Orient or Be Doomed!

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?