Have you ever wondered why business books and periodicals rarely talk about technology? Business books do go so far as to credit technology with helping to make businesses work, and the business news covers technology companies, but never talks about the technology itself. Is it because publishers think that technology is just too, well, technical for a business audience? Or because they think that technology isn’t a relevant or important topic for business discussions? Or, perish the thought, maybe these business publishers themselves don’t discuss technology because they were the jocks back in high school, and technology has always seemed to be of interest only to the nerds. In this book, Service-Orient or Be Doomed! How Service Orientation Will Change Your Business, we take aim at all three of these positions and lay each of them finally to rest. We make the case that technology is vitally important to today’s business. Dot-com bubble or not, every company those business periodicals covers technology throughout the organization. In fact, surprisingly for a couple of self-described nerds, the authors speak more about how emotions and human nature trip companies up than technology does but argue for the merging of IT and business and using Service-Oriented approaches as the territory in which to plant the flag of neutrality first. Certainly this book goes a long way toward being the manual that business and IT can use.
Ronald Schmelzer, ZapThink