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How You Can Put Other Companies' Assets to Work for You

How You Can Put Other Companies' Assets to Work for You
Traditional growth strategies require up-front investment in new assets in the hope of future profits. Result? Narrow margins-for a time, or forever. Here's a better way to spur growth: Leverage assets that other companies own. For example, aggregate related firms' resources to create value-added service portfolios. Investment giant Charles Schwab does this by putting together specialized third-party resources (for example, Dow Jones news stories, Standard & Poor's company reports, and First Call earnings forecasts) to help customers make investment decisions. Through Schwab, customers can also access other companies' investment products or participating independent investment counselors. Schwab attracts more customers-at lower costs than if it owned the underlying assets

Are ESBs hurting SOA? Or is it just bad architecture?

I came across this article on TechTarget.com by Rich Seeley, outlining issues around ESB integration. "Enterprise service bus (ESB) intermediation remains an issue despite the adoption of WS-* standards, argues John Michelsen, chief architect at iTKO Inc., the testing vendor specializing in service-oriented architecture (SOA)." "They're finding that two or three different divisions of their company are using different ESBs from different vendors." Okay, there are so many things wrong with this I don't know where to start. First, if there is indeed "enterprise architecture" and an "enterprise architect" then the different divisions should not be using different ESBs, or... READ MORE

 
 

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Should you Fire your CIO?

One of the things covered in the recent Burton report was an instance where a new CIO was needed to get SOA going. Loraine Lawson does a good job covering the report, and the CIO angle in her recent post. "A new CIO coming on board during a business and IT reorganization often made the difference between SOA failure and SOA success, according to Anne Thomas Manes, an analyst with the Burton Group who recently studied real-world SOA implementations." I covered this report last week, as you may remember, as well as my podcast. The reality is that CIOs are... READ MORE

 
 

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Are You Looking for a Horizontal ERP Software Package or an Industry Specific Solution?

I hear prospects say they are “only looking for an industry specific solution”, which is code for I only want to consider packages that sell specifically to my vertical market. If I am leading a software selection project and I limit my options to such a small segment of an otherwise large product mix, how do I really know if I am finding the right solution?

 
 

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Are you seeing SOA rage?

I'm getting some reports from a few of those charged with making SOA work within some of the larger enterprises. They are experiencing what I call SOA rage. SOA rage is the negative reaction some of the architects are getting from those charged with changing existing systems. I expected some of this. We're doing a few things that could indeed get on the last nerve of existing IT, such as looking at existing inefficiencies, including static and hard-to-change architectures that allow you to determine the ROI of SOA. Many preserve these attacks on systems and processes that they have cared... READ MORE

 
 

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SOA governance Dos and Don'ts

SOA Governance is one of those things in the world of SOA that's largely misunderstood. I can understand why, as the vendors are defining it differently. However, as SOA problem domains become more complex, typically more than 50 services, the need for SOA governance becomes even more apparent. So, how does one select a SOA Governance solution? It's really a matter of a few dos and don'ts. Dos Do select a vendor that provides SOA governance features that are more runtime in nature. Many SOA governance tools focus on design-time features, which are fine, but the runtime features provide the... READ MORE

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