When I read one of the drafts of OASIS SOA Reference Model standard a few years ago, I felt like being electro-shocked by the idea that familiar technical services might be described as business services (that IT had a 'taboo' to touch). I dug into technology-business issues related to services and found a few non-obvious things, at least, not commonly assumed in IT.
One of such things was a 'discovery' that business is not process- but service-oriented at the enterprise level. Another finding was that many SOA initiatives 'boxed' in IT are not about service orientation or head into cul-de-sac because they cannot relieve the real business value to the business that does not 'think' in services.
At the same time, it became more and more obvious that the concept of service orientation can easily bridge the gap between business and IT if applied as the driving concept to the enterprise organisation. In other words, for technical services to succeed and provide for real business tasks, the business and technology have to be organised oriented on services.
In my book "Ladder to SOE", which is available now from Amazon and other booksellers, I am promoting the idea of service orientation as glue for business and IT collaborations as well as an elixir of change adoptability and business efficiency. The book summarises some of my research results and systematises the steps of transforming regular organisation into Service-Oriented Enterprise. These include business model decomposition, business functional organisation, service-oriented initiative funding, architecture, management, design and testing. Along this line, I analyse how the concept of service orientation affects SOMA, SOBA, TOGAF, ITIL, DDD and even calculation of service ROI.
I would be very interested in your feedback on this book and proposals for new ones :-)
"Ladder to SOE" may be bought from:
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