ABSTRACT

We are at an exciting crossroads, bringing technology and business together as never before. Global collaboration and emerging corporate cultures are creating a new type of innovative enterprise: one based on services. Service orientation is about culture, a new service-focused approach of doing business as the modus operandi. Service orientation is also about technology, a standard and effective way of connecting businesses. Enterprises can be empowered to live up to the potential of becoming dynamic, agile, and realtime. Service orientation is emerging from the amalgamation of a number of key business, technology, and cultural developments. Three essential trends in particular are coming together to create a new revolutionary breed of enterprise, the service oriented enterprise (SOE): (1) advances in the standards-based service oriented infrastructures; (2) the emergence of business process management (BPM); and (3) the continuous performance management of the enterprise.