The word service has a surfeit of different meanings in today’s enterprise. First, there are information technology (IT) services that represent capabilities that the IT department offers to its customers, namely, the business. Second, business services address the requirements of line of business and provide real-time visibility and control over the business to management. And finally, with the rise of Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA), enterprises are now familiar with loosely coupled services implemented through emerging technologies such as Web Services that represent software functionality and data that the business can compose as needed into flexible business processes.

Each type of service has its own implementation requirements, management technology, and best practices that firms leverage to maintain the value of the services, but the real challenge to the effectiveness of each type of service is that the people in charge of the business and IT don’t see eye-to-eye about the visibility needs of the organization limits the effectiveness of each type of service. As SOA becomes the established approach to Enterprise Architecture, however, there promises to be a convergence of the various types of service into a single, business-oriented, loosely coupled service abstraction that provides sufficient real-time visibility and control to the enterprise.Download File