Today, enterprises have to do more than just manage their businesses -- they must also manage change and opportunity. This is the heart of an adaptive enterprise, synchronizing business and IT to capitalize on change. To that end, enterprises in 2005 are implementing web service based applications and Service-Oriented Architectures (SOA) to help quickly respond to rapidly changing market environments and solve their business needs. SOA accomplishes this by helping to capture business processes as services, implementing these services as applications supported by infrastructure services making IT more flexible overall and capable of sharing services and supporting change in timeframes that can differentiate the business.
Now that application architects are increasingly directly influence budget and are responsible for making the shift to SOA, they understand that they cannot benefit from the better flexibility and control unless they properly manage and govern the environment and the lifecycle of the services they create to support business services. In other words, the power created by SOA is useless without the governance and management to provide the controls.
