Service Orientation

Paul Allen is a principal business-IT strategist at CA and is widely recognized for his innovative work in component-based development (CBD), business-IT alignment and service-oriented architecture. With over thirty years experience of large-scale business systems, he is an established author whose previous book was the critically acclaimed Realizing e-Business with Components. Sam Higgins is now with Forrester Research Inc.; formerly he managed the Innovation and Planning Unit of Queensland Transport's Information Services Branch. Paul McRae is the application architect in the Innovation and Planning Unit of Queensland Transport's Information Services Branch. Hermann Schlamann is a senior architect in the architecture group of Credit Suisse.

• Foreword; Preface; Acknowledgements; Acronyms and abbreviations; Part I. Overview: 1. Basics of service-orientation; 2. Execution management; 3. Business process management; Part II. Business Architecture: 4. Service-oriented process redesign; 5. Gleaning business value; 6. Achieving business agility; Part III. Service-oriented architecture: 7. Service-oriented architecture themes; 8. Service-oriented architecture policy; 9. Service design; 10. QoS infrastructure design; Part IV. Service-Oriented Management: 11. The big picture; 12. Service-level agreements; 13. Cultural factors; Part V. Case Studies: 14. Queensland Transport: a case study in service-orientation; 15. Credit Suisse: a case study in service-orientation; References; Useful sources of information.

'For the last 40 years, business has viewed IT as its principal tool to increase productivity, and rightly so. Industries as diverse as retailing and financial services have been transformed by technology, especially when used in a networked way. Yet very often, IT has constrained the evolution of those business processes by imposing rigid technology implementations on them. And even worse, as IT has grown and become more important, it has become more complex and difficult to manage, especially in larger enterprises. In some cases the sheer complexity of the IT environment has started to limit the ability of companies to innovate. However, as Paul Allen shows, recent advances in IT processes and technologies, especially service-oriented architectures are starting to free companies up from these constraints, and allow them to once again align their IT processes in support of their business processes. Service Orientation: Winning Strategies and Best Practices charts the course for handling what promises to be as profound a change to IT as any that has occurred in the last few decades.' John A Swainson, President and CEO, CA