Service Orientation: Winning Strategies and Best Practices

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 introduction to service orientation, showing how it works and highlighting the benefits it can deliver. 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.