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

CHAPTER 11

Build Agility with Agility

We promised at the outset that this book would be a business book, not a technology book, but we didn't mean that we would ignore technology altogether. We have doled out measured portions of technology, because, after all, we really mean this book to marry the concepts of IT and business. However, we couldn't call this an eBusiness book because of the dot-com stigma still associated with the term. Besides, eBusiness hasn't yet resolved the long-lived problems of inflexibility that Service Orientation is more specifically focused on. Nevertheless, by considering IT capabilities to be business resources, we both bring new life to the tired eBusiness term by providing a thorough grounding in Service Orientation as the raison d'être for eBusiness.

As a recap, we've thoroughly covered what's wrong with IT and how business uses IT today, as well as what Service Orientation is, why you would want it, what steps you should take to implement it, and how your business can succeed with it. In this chapter, we return to the IT department—not with technical minutiae by any means, but rather with how the department must change the way it builds, manages, and evolves the technology that underlies your company's Services.

DEATH TO THE SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT LIFECYCLE!

Bringing Service Orientation to the IT department sacrifices a number of sacred cows, not the least of which is the Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC). The SDLC is a concept that details ...