Introduction

Technology trends have reached a new ‘tipping-point’ that follows the rise of the Internet decades ago and the burst in popularity of the "Information Web" in the mid-90s. We are seeing the emergence of the "Business Web" - a worldwide network of interconnected business services. New technologies mean the fulfillment of the vision of seamless industry orchestration between disparate companies based on turnkey business process integration. Business executives and information technology (IT) executives within your company can leverage emerging capabilities to become a participant and innovator within the Business Web. Your business managers will have much greater control in the design and deployment of new online business services. For your IT managers, their success is measured by how seamlessly IT systems support your company's new service offerings.

The process by which companies realign their business and technology initiatives to participate within the Business Web is what we have termed Service-Oriented Transformation™ (SOT). This transformation process requires new ways of describing and managing your business practices. Your business analysts model your company, along with other companies (including your partners and competitors), as entities that collaborate within the Business Web. You can gain new insights into how to evolve your company's value propositions and core competencies within the Business Web by modeling your value-chain as a series of online service providers and service consumers through SOT.

Service-Oriented Transformation has both business and technology aspects – it is fundamentally a reorientation of business planning processes made possible through the deployment of new integration technology. For your company to maximize the capabilities of SOT, your business and IT executives face a series of challenges. Successful SOT initiatives involve cross-discipline teams that develop plans to adapt key SOT technologies, encourage business planning processes to become more flexible and agile, and finally drive innovative new business initiatives that take advantage of these capabilities. SOT also has profound implications for Business Process Outsourcing - the leveraging of technology vendors who can provide and manage your critical and non-critical enterprise applications.