Total Service Orientation – Business As Usual or Paradigm Shift?
by
Rolf Kubli
Service orientation and service architecture principles have the potential to become the glue and the ordering principle across all layers of business process design and the supporting IT solutions.
On the business side, industrialization of hitherto vertically integrated enterprises calls for better structuring and decomposition of business processes, leading to shared business services and associated orchestration and integration architectures.
On the technology side, virtualization and grid computing, through higher levels of abstraction, lead to new ways of specifying functionality in business and service terms (contract, policy, quality, security…), as is already in evidence with Web services. Service science, though still in its infancy, will be growing.
These trends are pointing in the same direction: service-orientation.
The gap between business and IT will be closed, leading to substantial efficiency and effectiveness improvements, as well as to risk reduction due to improved communication based on common terminology. The opportunity to arrive at seamless integration and alignment based on common service models and architecture principles is on the horizon, on one hand vertically specialized within industry sectors, on the other by sharing horizontal services - total service orientation.
Removing interoperation barriers will stimulate innovation and growth. Once the sheer computing capability is a commodity, the winners will be the companies mastering the knowledge and contact networks, which enable them to access, combine and adapt business critical services and standard service-oriented enterprise packages on a global scale faster than anybody else.
Service architecture closes the gap. People will mainly buy services of all kinds - business as usual or paradigm shift?
