Service Orientation: The Business Process Dimension

by Paul Allen

Business is increasingly moving toward a marketplace model. This model is in sharp contrast to the traditional view of an organization as a production line. In this new world, organizations collaborate together, consuming and offering services to maximize efficiency, better serve customers, and achieve long-term advantage. This is the world of service orientation in which business is increasingly less supported by software and more enabled by it. This means that simply automating business activities in software is no longer sufficient; instead, the software must be agile enough to cope with change and foster innovation.