“This book clearly shows how today’s industry pressures and business challenges mandate renewal of the contract between organizations and their IT assets and people–and it illustrates how a service-oriented approach to IT can help organizations go through the necessary transformation. The role of governance in bringing IT and business closer together is particularly well explained, and the book is worth reading for that alone.”–Neil Ward-Dutton, Research Director, Macehiter Ward-Dutton“It’s easy to pay lip service to the concept of business/IT alignment, but inThe New Language of Business, Sandy Carter walks the walk. Few treatments of SOA ground this admittedly difficult topic in the world of business as thoroughly as Sandy has here. I’d recommend this book to any business reader who wants to leverage IT to make their business more agile and innovative, and to any technical reader who wishes to understand how to place SOA in the business context where it belongs.”–Jason Bloomberg, Senior Analyst and Principal, ZapThink LLC“A very valuable read. In today’s globally connected marketplace profitable growth requires business flexibility and continuous innovation, both of which are increasingly proving to be impossible without business modularity and the new table-stakes technology SOA.” –Ron Williams, Professor, Kenan-Flagler Business School, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill“Sandy has provided a pragmatic and holistic perspective on Service Oriented Architectures. She adds credibility by sharing IBM’s in-depth customer research as well as case studies to support the findings. The book is a strong source book for those wanting to get started with SOA.” –Judith Hurwitz, President & CEO, Hurwitz & Associates, coauthor,Service Oriented Architectures for Dummies “Few people have thought as long or as hard about SOA as Sandy Carter. This book embodies her invaluable work and the work of many at IBM to research, define, deploy and make SOA happen. Useful not just from a SOA perspective, but also as a concise articulation of the contemporary concepts fundamental to understanding where business and IT are heading.”–Carol Baroudi, coauthor Service Oriented Architecture For Dummies, Senior Analyst, Aberdeen Group“The New Language of Business: SOA & Web 2.0 is based on the collective feedback from industry leaders at organizations of all sizes, in more than 50 countries, who shared their views, experiences, and challenges of aligning technology with business goals.” –From the foreword by Steve Mills, Senior Vice President and Group Executive, IBM Software GroupThere is now a direct, provable link between an organization’s flexibility and business performance. To optimize flexibility, companies must achieve unprecedented levels of integration and automation of key processes and infrastructure, both internally and externally. At the same time, they must learn to manage their processes far more dynamically and responsively.They must become flex-pon-sive*. Until recently, technology stood in the way of achieving these goals. Thanks to the emergence of service oriented architecture (SOA), Web 2.0, and open standards, technology now enables companies to achieve those Read Less