Authors

Judith Hurwitz, CEO

Robin Bloor, Partner

Sponsored by EMC

The reality is that by combining SOA with virtualization in an intelligent way, we can address this complex customer requirement.                        

Companies increasingly depend on their IT assets to strengthen their ability to
react to changing business conditions. This has been the reality for many decades,
but now profound changes are taking place in how organizations are approaching
this need. In the past, organizations were happy to deploy their IT assets in an
application-centric manner, treating each new business application as a separate
new workload and buying sufficient hardware to deliver the level of service users
would expect from that business application. They were deploying their resource
in what have come to be called "silos".

Authors

Marcia Kaufman, Partner

Dr. Fern Halper, Partner

Judith Hurwitz, CEO

Sponsored by IBM

The most successful companies in this very process-intensive sector have recognized that consistent, efficient, and repeatable business processes are a required foundation for meeting their goals for growth and innovation.                                                                          

Financial services organizations faced with increasing competitive pressures are looking for innovative approaches to leverage their strategic assets. Many companies are looking to implement industry best practices to enable the business to increase revenue, attract new customers, and offer new products – without increasing expenses dramatically. The most successful companies in this very process-intensive sector have recognized that consistent, efficient, and repeatable business processes are a required foundation for meeting their goals for growth and innovation. Hurwitz & Associates recommends that organizations select routes to business innovation by improving efficiencies based on identifying common processes. Because this is by no means an easy task for a large financial services organization, it must be approached in an incremental way. To understand the impact of process on financial services companies, it is helpful to look at some examples.

Author Robin Bloor, Partner

Sponsored by OpenSpan

Enabling user productivity on the desktop

A dirty little secret that escapes the view of many IT professionals and many
business managers too, is that the users are what makes business applications
work. Most business software doesn’t work very well. No matter whether it is built
in-house or bought as a package, business software rarely fits the business process
it serves with any precision.

Authors
Judith Hurwitz, CEO & President
Robin Bloor, Partner

Sponsored by IBM

SOA enables organizations to overcome the traditional problems associated with applications that are too inflexible to support business change.
The promise of a service-oriented architecture (SOA) is facile systems – flexible, extensible, infinitely reusable, always predictable and reliable. SOA is a philosophy and methodology aimed at creating flexible, adaptable, sustainable businesses. Under SOA, the idea of reuse permeates the thinking of an entire organization, permeates the consideration of every process, project, and purchase. It is a journey of transformation that takes place over time.

Authors
Marcia Kaufman, Partner

Sponsored by Systinet

“With SOA, we are beginning to see that CIOs are able to create IT value that is not tied to one specific problem or condition.”
How do companies meet the broad range of business challenges in an era dominated by increasingly fierce global competition and a seemingly endless wave of mergers and acquisitions? One of the best ways is to increase their business flexibility. Organizations need to leverage investments in their existing applications and develop more efficient ways to share internal and external business processes and applications with their partners, suppliers, and customers.