Services Oriented Architectures (SOAs) and business collaboration technologies and platforms, often enabled by Web Services and orchestration constructs like BPEL, can be a tremendous business benefit. SOAs can provide the fl exibility in enterprises to adapt to rapidly changing business conditions. Collaboration platforms enable tighter integration between trading partners both at a data and process level. When successfully implemented, these approaches and tools can garner significant improvements in efficiency, communication, service levels, and ultimately profits. However, quantifying the benefit can prove challenging.
As services proliferate and orchestration platforms automate increasing numbers of processes, manual oversight of low-level details becomes impractical and unnecessary. So identifying and addressing the issues require a more analytics-based approach than in the past.
