Think business processes for SOA success

摘要

History is not on our side. Organisations have wasted vast amounts of money and time chasing suppliers' claims, consumed by the notion that investing in IT is going to help them make more money. Various middleware and integration stacks have been deployed in a bid to facilitate increased flexibility, yet we seem no further on. Although software suppliers would like us to buy into the vision of organisations running their software wall-to-wall, the reality is that heterogeneous IT is very much the norm. As a consequence, a vast proportion of IT budgets are eaten up trying to manage complexity. This is an intricate mix of maintenance, additional custom development, integration and change management, which constrains the IT department and puts a firm lid on innovation. Add to this the demands of modern business for 24x7 operations, high availability of systems, and the challenge of integration, and it is little wonder that IT impedes the speed with which businesses can execute. For many organisations technology has had the effect of casting processes in 'concrete boots', making agility a laughable notion.