Service Orientation: Winning Strategies and Best Practices [Hardcover]

Paul Allen (Author), Sam Higgins (Contributor), Paul McRae (Contributor), Hermann Schlamann (Contributor)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0521843367 | ISBN-13: 978-0521843362 | Publication Date: May 29, 2006

Companies face major challenges as they seek to flourish in competitive global markets, fuelled by developments in technology, from the Internet to grid computing and Web services. In this environment, service orientation - aligning business processes to the changing demands of customers - is emerging as a highly effective approach to increasing efficiency. In this book, Paul Allen provides an accessible guide to service orientation, showing how it works and highlighting the benefits it can deliver. The book provides an integrated approach: after covering the basics of service orientation, he discusses key issues such as business agility, designing quality-of-service infrastructure, implementing service-level agreements, and cultural factors. He provides roadmaps, definitions, templates, techniques, process patterns and checklists to help you realize service orientation. These resources are reinforced with detailed case studies, from the transport and banking sectors. Packed with valuable insights, the book will be essential reading for CIOs, IT architects and senior developers. IT facing business executives will also benefit from understanding how software services can enable their business strategies. Paul Allen is a principal business-IT strategist at CA and is widely recognized for his innovative work in component-based development (CBD), business-IT alignment and service-oriented architecture. With over thirty years experience of large-scale business systems, he is an established author whose previous book was the critically acclaimed 'Realizing e-Business with Components'. Sam Higgins is now with Forrester Research Inc.; formerly he managed the Innovation and Planning Unit of Queensland Transport's Information Services Branch. Paul McRae is the application architect in the Innovation and Planning Unit of Queensland Transport's Information Services Branch. Hermann Schlamann is a senior architect in the architecture group of Credit Suisse.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"For the last 40 years, business has viewed IT as its principal tool to increase productivity, and rightly so. Industries as diverse as retailing and financial services have been transformed by technology, especially when used in a networked way. Yet very often, IT has constrained the evolution of those business processes by imposing rigid technology implementations on them. And even worse, as IT has grown and become more important, it has become more complex and difficult to manage, especially in larger enterprises. In some cases the sheer complexity of the IT environment has started to limit the ability of companies to innovate. However, as Paul Allen shows, recent advances in IT processes and technologies, especially service-oriented architectures are starting to free companies up from these constraints, and allow them to once again align their IT processes in support of their business processes. Service Orientation: Winning Strategies and Best Practices charts the course for handling what promises to be as profound a change to IT as any that has occurred in the last few decades."
John A Swainson, President and CEO, CA

Book Description

Paul Allen provides an accessible introduction to service orientation, showing how it works and highlighting the benefits it can deliver. Packed with valuable insights, the book will be essential reading for CIOs, IT architects and senior developers.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 360 pages
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press (May 29, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0521843367
• ISBN-13: 978-0521843362
• Product Dimensions: 9.7 x 7.1 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.9 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,257,665 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

14 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars SOA book for the business analyst, March 24, 2006

By 

Jason Bloomberg (Uxbridge, MA USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Service Orientation: Winning Strategies and Best Practices (Hardcover)

Most SOA books on the market are technical books for purely technical audiences. SOA is architecture, after all, and software architecture can be a complex, technically difficult subject. Recently, though, several business-oriented books on SOA have hit the shelves. These books typically attempt to explain the intricacies of SOA and the underlying alphabet soup of technologies and standards in a non-technical fashion for an audience that would like a high-level view of what SOA is all about, but who doesn't really want to know either the technical details or how to roll up their sleeves and work with SOA themselves.

This book falls into neither of these categories. "Service-Orientation: Winning Strategies And Best Practices" is an exceptional example of a book written for a technically savvy business reader who doesn't want merely a high-level explanation of SOA, but rather wants to understand the critical SOA concepts, strategies, and best practices that they need to do their job. This choice of audience is no accident. In fact, part of the fundamental transformative nature of SOA involves new roles for the individuals at the companies that implement the architecture. Understanding the proper audience for this book, therefore, is an important step on the road to understanding SOA.

SOA is basically an approach -- or discipline, if you will -- for organizing IT resources as business-oriented Services that users can find, use, and incorporate into business processes. Core to SOA is the notion of the Services abstraction layer -- the representation of IT functionality that business users interact with. Beneath this abstraction layer are applications, servers, networks, and the rest of the heterogeneous collection of technology that IT shops maintain today. From the business user's perspective, however, this complex mishmash of technologies fade from view. What remains are the Services and the business processes that orchestrate them.

As a result, the challenges that businesses face as they leverage the power of SOA fall into two general areas: management and process. Management is the first challenge, because the business must be able to rely upon their IT infrastructure without having to pierce the Services abstraction to control the nuts and bolts of the implementation beneath. The core management issues that this book's audience must focus on include Service execution management, Service level management, as well as the management of the business process that constitute the second set of challenges for businesses that implement SOA. Among those challenges are building business Services and composing them into business processes that are themselves Services. Such Service-oriented processes enable the broad redesign of the older, inflexible processes that are typically in place today at most organizations.

The level of detail this book provides, therefore, is for a new kind of audience that must understand the intricacies of Service-oriented management and process. The average business reader will not typically need or want this level of detail, and the typical technical reader will require more information about the technical details underneath the Services abstraction than this book intends to provide. The big question, therefore, is what sort of person is among the audience for this book, and are you that sort of person?

The most common title for this book's target audience member might be business analyst, and there's no question that many business analysts will find this book useful and understandable. However, the business analyst title is poorly defined, and two people with this title at different organizations might find their jobs to be vastly different. As companies implement SOA, though, it is likely that many business analysts will find their roles coalescing onto a more specific set of responsibilities centering on process and management as explained above.

Other roles that may either fall into the broader business analyst category or be separate titles in their own right are that of the Service architect and business process architect. As explained in Chapter 13, people in these roles focus on building business Services, composing them into processes, and then managing those processes as they meet changing business requirements. Such people are business-oriented yet technically savvy, understand SOA from a business perspective, and often act as liaisons between business management and IT. Regardless of whether your title is business analyst, Service architect, or process architect, if you are a roll-up-the-sleeves business reader and you find yourself in this bridge role between business and IT as your company implements SOA, then this book is for you.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars high level [non-technical] advice, September 23, 2006

By 

W Boudville (Terra, Sol 3) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Service Orientation: Winning Strategies and Best Practices (Hardcover)

Service Oriented Architecture has gotten considerable attention recently. The book studies its potential in improving business processes. Both within a company and between companies. There is very little here at the technical level of programming. The book is pitched at a higher level, suitable for upper management interested in improving the corporate business value. Advice is furnished on how to devise measurable goals. So that any redesign does not take place in a vacuum.

It is also suggested that business agility can be enhanced. By letting a company redirect and modify existing services in an easy modular manner.