The Marriage of Business and IT

Vahid Garousi

 The New Language of Business: SOA & Web 2.0 by Sandy Carter, IBM Press, 2007, ISBN 978-0131956544, 320 pp.

The New Language of Business projects an evolving bond between business, management, and IT, in which service-oriented architecture (SOA) provides the unifying force. The author, Sandy Carter, is the IBM VP for Websphere Strategy, Channels, and Marketing. She brings many years of business and industrial software engineering and management experience in the SOA and Web world.

Carter reports that more than 75 percent of CEOs place a high priority on the ability to respond rapidly to changes, yet only one in 10 CEOs believes that his or her organization has the capability to do so. She then argues for SOA as a framework to make software organizations more responsive to changing market conditions.

The book has three parts:

• Start at the Beginning—The Business
• A Flexible Business Requires Flexible IT, and
• How to Implement Flex-pon-sive* in Your Business.

Carter defines a “Flex-pon-sive*” company as one that responds with speed and agility to rapidly changing business needs. She suggests that, to compete successfully, business competencies must be industry specific. She includes numerous software industry case studies thatadd a lot to the book’s message.

Each chapter builds nicely on the previous chapters, and the book’s overall structure interconnects the material well. I found it enjoyable to read the book in a sequential manner. Nevertheless, you can read any chapter without a thorough knowledge of the previous chapters.

The list of 10 don’ts for the Flex-pon-sive* process was interesting. One of them, “Don’t throw everything out!” encourages reusing artifacts whenever possible, such as technology, business processes, and development processes. Another suggestion, “Don’t forget the right skills,” reminds the reader that no technology or framework, including SOA, can replace the proper skill set for completing a project successfully, on time, and on budget.

Carter finishes with a comprehensive case study of applying SOA to transform IBM from a monolithic, decentralized company to a flexible business. Over a four-year period (2002–2006), IBM reportedly evolved from exploratory activities and pilots to aggressive adoption and acceleration of SOA assets in the company’s solution-development process.

A variety of readers will find this book useful, but it will be of specific interest to IT managers and entrepreneurs. Although the book isn’t very technical, it would make a suitable reference book for a graduate-level course on SOA, software management, and software economics. Researchers and practitioners in these fields might also find it helpful.Its realistic case studies should motivate similar work in the SOA context.

Vahid Garousi is an assistant professor of software engineering and an Alberta Ingenuity new faculty at the University of Calgary. Contact him at vgarousi@ucalgary.ca.