This has given rise to the Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) ideal, an agile IT architecture which can adapt and respond to changing business dynamics quickly and nimbly, resulting in sticky customers, cost- effectiveness and increased return on investment.
Now, organisations see IT as providing a competitive business advantage - but only when maximum agility is achieved; otherwise IT is yet another growth bottleneck. Using SOA implementations that go well beyond what people typically think of as `Web services,' organisations are now fusing their business processes to build an agile enterprise by creating composite applications on Web services, often delivering these through enterprise portals.
