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

CHAPTER 6

Service Orientation: Light at the End of the Tunnel

At this point, you probably wonder what has taken us so long to define the terms Service and Service Orientation, the two main ideas of this book. The reason for our delay is that understanding these two ideas requires a significant adjustment in the way that we think about business and IT. We had to first discuss business agility—what it is, why companies need it, and the reasons that it's been out of reach all this time. Next we had to introduce the concept of loosely coupled distributed computing and explain why the primary limitation on companies' ability to be agile are their brittle, rats' nests of IT infrastructures. Even though this isn't a technology-focused book, we had to give you a sufficient conceptual background in the intricacies of loosely coupled IT so that we can intelligently talk about Services and the broader business concept of Service Orientation. Now that you are familiar with the darkness inside the tunnel, let's lead you to the light at its end.

WHAT'S A SERVICE, ANYWAY?

The word service is one of those vague terms with many different meanings depending on the context. In different situations, service is what you get in a restaurant or gas station, what you're in when you join the army, or what you endure in church. There is a common thread that winds its way through all of these meanings, however, and that is that the term service denotes actions or capabilities someone (or something) provides ...