2006

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Secrets of SOA: An Enterprise View on Service-Oriented Architecture Deployment Revealed

Targeted at management, the first six chapters of Secrets of SOA focus on the business impact of service-oriented architecture technological decisions with an emphasis on cost, flexibility, and the ability to maintain business objectives. Each of the six chapters explores a different topic that illustrates the value of a physically integrated SOA infrastructure organized at the enterprise level. Taken together, they demonstrate why enterprise-level planning, backed by a centralized deployment strategy, is essential to the success of SOA. Aimed at the IT executive, the second half of the book deals with specific IT issues raised by SOAs and why these issues are best dealt with on an enterprise level. Among the topics covered in these eight chapters are virtualizing resources, managing heterogeneous workloads, maintaining data and transactional integrity, and the value of proximity.

Metrics for IT Service Management

Many organizations find it very difficult to use metrics properly, and badly designed metrics can be actively harmful to proper business functioning. This book addresses the causes of the difficulties and presents workable solutions. It provides a general guide to the design, implementation and use of metrics as a mechanism to control and steer IT service organizations, and specific recommendations for applying metrics across ITIL, ISO20000 (BS15000) and other processes, discussing the rationale of the recommendations.

Service Orient or Be Doomed!: How Service Orientation Will Change Your Business

Authors Jason Bloomberg and Ronald Schmelzer – senior analysts for 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.

Enterprise SOA

Information Technology professionals can use this book to move beyond the excitement of web services and service oriented architecture (SOA) and begin the process of finding actionable ideas to innovate and create business value. In Enterprise SOA: Designing IT for Business Innovation, SAP’s blueprint for putting SOA to work is analyzed from top to bottom. In addition to design, development, and architecture, vital contextual issues such as governance, security, change management, and culture are also explored. This comprehensive perspective reduces risk as IT departments implement ESA, a sound, flexible architecture for adapting business processes in response to changing market conditions. Based on extensive research with experts from the German software company SAP, this definitive book is ideal for architects, developers, and other IT professionals who want to understand the technology and business relevance of ESA in a detailed way – especially those who want to move on the technology now, rather than in the next year or two.

The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More

“The Long Tail” is a powerful new force in our economy: the rise of the niche. As the cost of reaching consumers drops dramatically, our markets are shifting from a one-size-fits-all model of mass appeal to one of unlimited variety for unique tastes. From supermarket shelves to advertising agencies, the ability to offer vast choice is changing everything, and causing us to rethink where our markets lie and how to get to them. Unlimited selection is revealing truths about what consumers want and how they want to get it, from DVDs at Netflix to songs on iTunes to advertising on Google. However, this is not just a virtue of online marketplaces; it is an example of an entirely new economic model for business, one that is just beginning to show its power. After a century of obsessing over the few products at the head of the demand curve, the new economics of distribution allow us to turn our focus to the many more products in the tail, which collectively can create a new market as big as the one we already know. The Long Tail is really about the economics of abundance. New efficiencies in distribution, manufacturing, and marketing are essentially resetting the definition of whats commercially viable across the board. If the 20th century was about hits, the 21st will be equally about niches.

Service Orientation: Winning Strategies and Best Practices

Companies face major challenges as they seek to flourish in competitive global markets, fuelled by developments in technology, from the Internet to grid computing and Web services. In this environment, service orientation – aligning business processes to the changing demands of customers – is emerging as a highly effective approach to increasing efficiency. In this book, Paul Allen provides an accessible guide to service orientation, showing how it works and highlighting the benefits it can deliver. The book provides an integrated approach: after covering the basics of service orientation, he discusses key issues such as business agility, designing quality-of-service infrastructure, implementing service-level agreements, and cultural factors. He provides roadmaps, definitions, templates, techniques, process patterns and checklists to help you realize service orientation. These resources are reinforced with detailed case studies, from the transport and banking sectors. Packed with valuable insights, the book will be essential reading for CIOs, IT architects and senior developers. IT facing business executives will also benefit from understanding how software services can enable their business strategies. 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.