Building the Agile Enterprise

Book excerpt: In the last ten years IT has brought fundamental changes to the way the world works. Not only has it increased the speed of operations and communications, but it has also undermined basic assumptions of traditional business models and increased the number of variables. Today, the survival of major corporations is challenged by a world-wide marketplace, international operations, outsourcing, global communities, a changing workforce, security threats, business continuity, web visibility, and customer expectations. Enterprises must constantly adapt or they will be unable to compete. Fred Cummins, an EDS Fellow, presents IT as a key enabler of the agile enterprise. He demonstrates how the convergence of key technologies—including SOA, BPM and emerging enterprise and data models—can be harnessed to transform the enterprise. Cummins mines his 25 years experience to provide IT leaders, as well as enterprise architects and management consultants, with the critical information, skills, and insights they need to partner with management and redesign the enterprise for continuous change. No other book puts IT at the center of this transformation, nor integrates these technologies for this purpose. - Shows how to integrate and deploy critical technologies to foster agility - Details how to design an enterprise architecture that takes full advantage of SOA, BPM, business rules, enterprise information management, business models, and governance - Outlines IT's critical mission in providing an integration infrastructure and key services, while optimizing technology adoption throughout the enterprise - Illustrates concepts with examples and cases from large and small commercial enterprises - Shows how to create systems that recognize and respond to the need for change - Identifies the unique security issues that arise with SOA and shows how to deploy a framework of technologies and processes that address them