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

CHAPTER 12

Becoming a Service-Oriented Enterprise

One of the great things about writing a book as forward-looking and far-reaching as this one is that by the time we get to the final chapter, we get to throw off the shackles of explaining basic concepts and illustrating short-term practicality and wax futuristic on the long-term potential of Service Orientation. As any futurist is wont to do, we'll consider a scenario for the future—the scenario of the Service-Oriented Enterprise. Assuming companies around the world take all the advice in this book, and successfully navigate the pitfalls of implementing enterprise SOA and leveraging the power of Service Orientation across their businesses, then what will their companies—and the world at large—be like?

MAKING IT MATTER

We'll begin our trek through the future of Service Orientation with a look at the changing role of IT within the organization. Today IT serves a tactical role within most companies. In many organizations, IT has traditionally been a cost center. In the early years of computing, people saw IT solely as a means to automate existing business functions in the enterprise. When companies used hulking mainframes to store transaction or customer data, for example, there was no reason to expect that the IT department supporting that mainframe would somehow figure out how to turn the IT system into some kind of money generator for the organization.

As the early days of IT (affectionately known as data processing, or DP) gave ...