If your company embraced the reengineering revolution and is now hitting a wall, look beyond business processes to the new frontier of efficiency: the activities that make up those processes. Advances in IT--especially a relatively recent one called service-oriented architecture--are making it possible to design and deploy business activities as Lego-like software components, which can help transform your business into a highly productive plug-and-play operation. SOA enables discrete activities to be accessed via the internet and to be easily updated, shared, bought, and sold--both within your organization and externally. Most companies have thought of SOA merely as an easier, less expensive way to maintain the software that supports existing operations. By failing to revisit their organizational designs before applying SOA, however, these businesses are missing an opportunity to replace proprietary processes and activities with standardized, fungible ones. That's the nuanced argument made by Merrifield, of Microsoft; Calhoun, of Accelare; and Stevens, of Synaptus. To guide you through the intricacies of revisiting your operations, they outline an approach called a business capabilities analysis. Their method involves diagramming your company's work activities, describing the capabilities that support them, valuing and assessing the performance of both, and creating a heat map that helps identify the priorities for an improvement program. The authors share real-world examples of companies that have reaped rewards from this self-analysis and subsequent SOA implementation. They also acknowledge the barriers to applying SOA, including the gulf between CEOs and their IT departments. The leaders who overcome such obstacles, say the authors, will pioneer the next great leap in corporate productivity.

The author explores periods of rapid technological change for coincidences of widening inequality and slowing productivity growth.

How can you obtain real productivity results from all this Web technology your company has just purchased? How can you master the confusing watershed of over-hyped concepts, killer-apps and born-again Pure-play consultants? This book is the outcome of many discussions with managers dealing with the rise of e-businessat firm and/or team level. Gurus and pundits claim that the Web and its applications are poised to trigger a profound workplace revolution. The book shows that the Webs real promise lies in a service productivity revolution. It is structured to help the reader in his or her understanding of this three-step transformation:business as usual, but faster: basic uses of e-technologies, such as e-mail, Websites, online research and how simple tools can be used effectively to obtain office productivity improvements;same business, new channels: draw the implications for your business of developments such as e-commerce, marketplaces, Internet marketing and intranets;the e-management revolution: welcome to the e-revolutionexplore how the Web inventors dreams lead to a constant flow of new Web based applications and how these might, as they get absorbed by the market, change the face of business as we know it.