Jason Bloomberg & Ronald Schmelzer 
Service Orient or Be Doomed! 
How Service Orientation Will Change Your Business

How Service Orientation Will Change Your Business

‘The real value of this book is that it makes SOA and Web
services, which are critical and business-transforming,
crystal-clear to the layman, both business and IT leaders. The book
stays focused on the real-world issues facing business and
government institutions today. In an industry full of experts of
many stripes, Ron and Jason are the real thing: savvy, experienced,
and realistic. They have produced a must-read book for
management.’

–Paul Lipton, Senior Architect, Unicenter Web Services and
Application Management Computer Associates

‘This is by far the finest publication on SOA of our time. From
cover to back, Service Orient or Be Doomed! strips away the
layers of confusion most IT stakeholders face when confronted with
enterprise architecture, and illustrates pragmatic and practical
paths towards a sustainable and efficient enterprise architecture.
Both the technically savvy and the bean counters will enjoy this
book that speaks to the critical points they need to
understand.’

–Duane A. Nickull Senior Standards Strategist, Adobe Systems,
Inc. Chair, OASIS SOA Reference Model Technical Committee Vice
chair, United Nations CEFACT (UN/CEFACT)

‘If you’re looking for a guide that’s based on reality, this is
it. These guys know how you can service-orient your enterprise and
have the best chance of success. This book is the best SOA tool you
can buy. I’m recommending it to everyone.’

–Dave Linthicum, CEO, BRIDGEWERX

‘Jason and Ron are experts on Service-Oriented Architecture
(SOA) and have written the first book that is aimed at helping a
nontechnical businessperson understand why the SOA computing
revolution is critical to business. Rather than provide a nerdy
death via buzzword book, Jason and Ron take a humorous, clever, and
insightful romp through this new technology and how it impacts
business in general.’

–Brad Feld, Mobius Venture Capital

Authors Jason Bloomberg and Ronald Schmelzer-senior analysts for
highly respected IT advisory and analysis firm Zap Think-say it all
in the title of their new book, Service Orient or Be Doomed!:
How Service Orientation Will Change Your Business. That is, if
you fail to service orient your company, you will fail in competing
with the organizations that do.

This provocative new book takes service orientation out of its
more familiar technological surroundings within service-oriented
architecture and introduces it as a philosophy that advocates its
rightful place within a business context, redefining it as a new
way of thinking about organizing your business and its
processes.

Informal, challenging, and intelligent in style, Service
Orient or Be Doomed!: How Service Orientation Will Change Your
Business shows you how you can best use technology resources to
meet your company’s business goals and empower your company to go
from ‘stuck’ to ‘competitive.’

Table of Content

Preface.

CHAPTER 1: The Business Inflexibility Trap.

The Mother of All Business Problems.

One Constant Is Change.

Compliance Conundrum.

Need for Business Agility.

CHAPTER 2: If You’re in a Hole, the First Thing to Do
Is Stop Digging.

IT Decision Making’s Fatal Flaw.

The IT ‘Rat’s Nest’.

Why Are the Nerds Sitting at Their Own Table?

CHAPTER 3: What Really Happened to e Business.

e Business was a Great Idea, so What Happened?

e Business Is Dead! Long Live e Business!

How to Think like an e Businessperson.

Why Aren’t the Systems Integrators Helping Anymore?

Thrift: Get Used to It.

CHAPTER 4: What Do You Want Your IT to Do, Anyway?

Everyone’s a Grandma.

Middleware: Part of the Solution or Part of the Problem?

Automation Paradox.

Business Process: Sweetness and Light or Evil Hellspawn?

Missing Link in the IT Chain.

Who’s in Control of IT Anyway?

CHAPTER 5: The Secret Sauce: Loose Coupling.

Tale of Distributed Computing.

Power of Abstraction.

Role of Open Standards.

Running IT Like a Railroad.

How to Think Loosely Coupled.

Secret of the Best Ice Skaters.

How Loose Is Your Coupling?

CHAPTER 6: Service Orientation: Light at the End of the
Tunnel.

What’s a Service, Anyway?

Services + Loose Coupling = Agility.

Process This!

How Service-Oriented Process Replaces Traditional
Integration.

CHAPTER 7: Is There an Architect in the House?

New Discipline of Architecture.

Just How Big Is the Big Picture?

Putting All the Pieces Together.

Where Are the Architects?

Whither the IT Department?

CHAPTER 8: How to Think Service Oriented.

When Not to Use Service-Oriented Architecture.

Keeping Up with the Competition.

Service Orientation for Big Fish.

Service Orientation for Small Fish.

SOA to Stay Out of Jail.

SOA for User Empowerment.

SOA for Value Chains.

CHAPTER 9: Okay, So Where Do We Start?

Identifying the Problem.

Choosing Your Battles.

Top-Down Planning and Bottom-Up Planning.

Closer Look at Process Decomposition.

Find Your Champion.

CHAPTER 10: Tackling the Inertia in the Organization.

Selling Service Orientation to Your Boss, Team, and Company.

Quantifying the Cost and the Return on the Service Orientation
Investment.

Money, Money, Money: Where Will It Come from to Pay for SOA?

Reaching the SOA Tipping Point.

Return of the Luddites.

New Service-Oriented Organization.

CHAPTER 11: Build Agility with Agility.

Death to the Software Development Lifecycle!

Lego Block Model of Service Orientation.

Four Pillars of Service-Oriented Development.

Not Your Parents’ Requirements Gathering.

Build, Buy, or Repurpose?

Reuse: The Holy Grail of IT.

CHAPTER 12: Becoming a Service-Oriented Enterprise.

Making IT Matter.

Building Metaprocesses.

Connecting the Dots: Service Orientation, Outsourcing, and the
Industrialization of IT.

Sunset of Legacy.

Vision of the Business Web.

What Does It All Mean?

Index.

About the author

Jason Bloomberg (Uxbridge, MA), Zap Think senior analyst, has a diverse background in e Business technology management and industry analysis, including serving as a senior analyst in IDC’s e Business Advisory group, as well as holding e Business management positions at USWeb/CKS (later march FIRST) and Wave Bend Solutions (now Hitachi Consulting). He has a bachelor’s degree in physics from Pomona College, and Masters degrees in mathematics and history & philosophy of science from the University of Pittsburgh.

Ronald Schmelzer (Waltham, MA), Zap Think senior analyst and founder, is a well-known expert in the field of XML and XML-based standards and initiatives. He has been featured in and written for periodicals, and has spoken at numerous industry conferences including XML One, Comdex, and Internet World on the topic of XML. Schmelzer has served as the chair of the Rosetta Net Cluster 1 Workgroup, working group member of CPExchange, member of the UDDI advisory group, and was a member of the Comp TIA Electronic Commerce Standards Board (ECSB). He was named ‘Geek of the Week’ in Internet Magazine and was listed in Boston Magazine’s Internet Top 40. Schmelzer received a B.S. degree in Computer Science and Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).