Building the Agile Enterprise: With SOA, BPM and MBM

In the last ten years IT has brought fundamental changes to the way the world works. Not only has it increased the speed of operations and communications, but it has also undermined basic assumptions of traditional business models and increased the number of variables. Today, the survival of major corporations is challenged by a world-wide marketplace, international operations, outsourcing, global communities, a changing workforce, security threats, business continuity, web visibility, and customer expectations. Enterprises must constantly adapt or they will be unable to compete.

Fred Cummins, an EDS Fellow, presents IT as a key enabler of the agile enterprise. He demonstrates how the convergence of key technologies--including SOA, BPM and emerging enterprise and data models--can be harnessed to transform the enterprise. Cummins mines his 25 years experience to provide IT leaders, as well as enterprise architects and management consultants, with the critical information, skills, and insights they need to partner with management and redesign the enterprise for continuous change. No other book puts IT at the center of this transformation, nor integrates these technologies for this purpose.


"Building the Agile Enterprise not only covers many corner stones of enterprise agility, it delivers an integrated view of how agility is enabled by policies and a business awareness supported by technology architecture/design patterns. Fred Cummins has hit the mark by aggregating the many tributaries of agility instead of picking one pattern and/or technology. This is a sophisticated and integrated atlas that is a challenge for IT professionals to implement, but a must for flourishing organizations."

~Jim Sinur, Vice President, Gartner


"Never before has technology been so close to the business. In fact, technology is becoming more and more embedded in the business. This means that change has to go hand in hand on both at the business and the technology side, - or that technology has to at least support the high demands of business change. In particular, enterprise agility is a major requirement for those organizations that want to succeed in this new world dominated by rapid change. Business are increasingly asked to change and to react quickly to changes in market conditions - look at what's happening currently in the car manufacturing space with the increases in petrol prices or in the financial community with the sub-prime crises as just two examples. This book provides a marvelous, clear, and comprehensive road map of how key technologies such as service-oriented architecture, business process management, and model-based management are instrumental and key in realizing a truly agile enterprise. It explains why and how a structured and strategic approach to SOA, along with the adoption of other available paradigms and technologies, can enable future enterprise agility. As Fred suggests, this is a must-read for CIOs, enterprise architects, and IT management in general that is embracing transformation and innovation programs; I would go further and say that some key chapters will make great reading for CxOs outside IT and in the driving seat of the enterprise."

~Diego Lo Giudice, Principal, Forrester Research


"The author, Mr. Cummins, has already made a tremendous contribution to the discipline of Enterprise Business Management through his leadership in the development of business modeling standards as a co-chair of the Object Management Group's Business Modeling and Integration Domain Task Force. This book breathes life into those standards, with simple and clear explanations of how to apply these and other information technology standards in what is described as the Agile Enterprise, incorporating and expounding upon the most important trends in the advancement of information technology, such as Service Oriented Architecture and Business Process Management, culminating in a what he defines and explains as the discipline of Model Based Management. The authors level of experience is obvious from the generous use of industry examples and analogies. A must read for business leaders that need to demystify these technologies and standards, and other agents of enterprise transformation and adaptation!"

~George Thomas, Enterprise Chief Architect, US General Services Administration (GSA)

* Shows how to integrate and deploy critical technologies to foster agility.

* Details how to design an enterprise architecture that takes full advantage of SOA, BPM, business rules, enterprise information management, business models, and governance

* Outlines IT's critical mission in providing an integration infrastructure and key services, while optimizing technology adoption throughout the enterprise.

* Illustrates concepts with examples and cases from large and small commercial enterprises.

* Shows how to create systems that recognize and respond to the need for change.

* Identifies the unique security issues that arise with SOA and shows how to deploy a framework of technologies and processes that address them.