Enterprise SOA

What is IT's role if all of this comes to pass? What does my company look like then?

All right, let's fast-forward for a moment and assume you have a fully realized Enterprise Services Architecture in place. The Enterprise Services Repository has been built and populated, composite applications have been assembled and reassembled from the functionality of your old enterprise software, and your CIO has redubbed herself "chief process innovation officer" because her job ceased to be about wrangling IT resources and morphed into the oversight of gradual, continual tweaking of seamlessly integrated business process steps. Perhaps a chief IT officer is focused on that sort of work. Oh, and your employees in the trenches no longer pass around spreadsheets via email or tortuously retype data from one application to another (introducing the occasional critical error along the way). They're busy responding to the red alerts dispatched by various parts of an event-driven process automation humming along smoothly in the background, such as tactical analytical tools that filter discrete sets of data until some threshold is met, which automatically trigger the alert. This is your business on ESA. So, what's changed?

• The conventional org chart has ceased to matter. Once business processes took center stage in discussions of how the company should operate and be organized, traditional corporate departments began to melt away and re-form along functional lines. Politics and inertia impeded this ...