Service Orient or Be Doomed: ZapThink Analysts Announce Publication of their Latest Book!
Ever wonder why businesses are unable to keep up with today’s pace of change? Name your business goal–productivity, profitability, efficiency; today, they all depend on Information Technology (IT). IT is more important to business today than it ever was. While IT in the past has helped companies increasingly make their businesses more productive and efficient, today’s IT is simply getting in the way of change. It is increasingly becoming clear that the way that businesses utilize IT is increasingly making them less agile, less responsive to change, and less able to capitalize on new opportunities. Something has to be done to stop the problem of IT becoming the bottleneck of business.
SERVICE ORIENT OR BE DOOMED! How Service Orientation will Change Your Business (Wiley, February 24, 2006;$39.95 cloth) is the first book aimed at regular businesspeople that helps business become more agile by offering technological, process, and cultural changes to the way companies build and leverage information technology.
Businesspeople have generally been unable to grasp the language of how to best use IT to meet changing requirements, and IT departments are divorced from understanding changing business requirements. Companies often think that business and technology are two different worlds, with different languages, priorities, and best practices; they couldn’t be more wrong.
SERVICE ORIENT OR BE DOOMED! explains that companies must move past simply throwing more technology at the problem of the IT bottleneck, but rather adopt a business philosophy and approach for dealing with the unpredictable change that businesses introduce — Service Orientation — a new way of thinking about organizing the business and its processes. It is not a technology concept–it is a philosophy and approach for all businesses and systems. Readers of SERVICE ORIENT OR BE DOOMED! will come to understand how IT limits the flexibility of businesses; understand the big picture of service orientation; learn new approaches for building relationships between business and IT personnel; and learn how to manage risk as a company moves toward Service Orientation. Those that can adopt SOA successfully will thrive and flourish, and those that don’t will be doomed.
Through conversational, occasionally irreverent, frequently humorous, and intelligent discussion Ronald Schmelzer, ZapThink senior analyst and founder, and Jason Bloomberg ZapThink senior analyst, detail how to organize a business and its processes using a new, service-oriented approach.
Jason Bloomberg, ZapThink senior analyst, has a diverse background in eBusiness technology management and industry analysis, including serving as a senior analyst in IDC’s eBusiness Advisory group, as well as holding eBusiness management positions at USWeb/CKS (later marchFIRST) and WaveBend Solutions (now Hitachi Consulting). He has a bachelors degree in physics from Pomona College, and masters degrees in mathematics and history and philosophy of science from the University of Pittsburgh.
Ronald Schmelzer, ZapThink Senior Analyst and founder, is a well-known expert in the field service oriented architecture, Web services, XML, and XML-based standards and initiatives. He was named “Geek of the Week” in Internet Magazine and was listed in Boston Magazine’s Internet Top 40. Schmelzer received a bachelors degree in Computer Science and Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
ZapThink is an IT advisory and analysis firm that provides trusted advice and critical insight into the architectural and organizational changes brought about by the movement to XML, Web Services, and Service Orientation. They provide their three target audiences of IT vendors, service providers and end-users a clear roadmap for standards-based, loosely coupled distributed computing – a vision of IT meeting the needs of the agile business.
SERVICE ORIENT OR BE DOOMED! is a practical, hands-on book that illustrates how to organize a business and its processes in a service oriented manner.
SERVICE ORIENT OR BE DOOMED!
Written by Jason Bloomberg and Ronald Schmelzer
Wiley,0-471-76858-8
Hardcover,$39.95; Available NOW!