Service-oriented architecture (SOA) and Web services are being critically
considered by most organizations today in some form or another. The adoption
of SOA and Web services has gained momentum after the standardization of
various aspects such as security, business process coordination, transaction
management, communication protocol, registration and discovery, etc. However,
one notable and practical aspect of designing, implementing, and managing
services has not been tackled at a specification level. This aspect is
related to the management of change and interface versions.
Real-world business and infrastructure services will be dynamic and subject
to change due to various issues that may range from a business rules change
to service-level improvement. It is a challen... (more)
Agile IT systems are systems that are malleable enough to address business
uncertainties. Such systems can effectively respond to internal and external
stimuli in a very short period of time. Flexible IT systems imply that the IT
architecture underlying them is itself flexible and lends itself to
incorporating changes in a dynamic fashion. Architectural approaches such as
Service Oriente... (more)
SOA initiatives have gathered momentum in the past year with more enterprises
either implementing SOA or considering implementing in the near future. The
implementations we studied reveal that one of the critical challenges in SOA
is designing an effective governance mechanism. A good understanding of
governance concepts is essential to implementing and operating a successful
SOA. Reliab... (more)
Legacy systems are a core asset at many organizations. These legacy systems
have been around for decades and have a very critical impact on day to day
business processes. However, owing to a variety of reasons, these legacy
systems have high TCO and represent a bottleneck towards the emergence of an
agile IT portfolio. In this article we'll focus on a variety of options that
may be avail... (more)
Enterprises are increasingly feeling the need for shorter lead time for
decision making, the need to extract and present KPI (Key Performance
Indicators) to management, and the need for enhanced response capability.
These business needs are not in sync with the technological challenges such
as the presence of heterogeneous technologies and disparate enterprise
systems (e.g., ERP, SCM, CR... (more)