SOA People, Process and Information

[ MUSIC ]

Can I help you? Oj, you're looking for innovation through SOA? Well, you've come to the right place. Innovation is is all about having the flexibility to change quickly, easily and economically. And a Service-Oriented Architecture or SOA can enable IT systems to efficiently adapt to support changing business needs.

Oh, you're not sure where to start? Well, that's okay. You're not alone. The good news is, if you're looking at SOA from a business-centric view, IBM makes it easy to get started, with three business-centric entry points into SOA.

No matter which entry point you take, IBM can help you with specialized hardware, software, services and expertise. Come with me. I'll show you.

As it turns out, companies typically approach SOA with a focus on integrating people, process or information. We'll start with information. But don't worry, it doesn't really matter which path you take. They all lead to the same place: innovation through SOA.

Organizations focused on information want to improve business insight and reduce risk by using trusted information services, delivered inline and in context. But when duplicate or contradictory information is scattered across multiple locations, users cannot confidently use this information for decision making.

IBM Information Management Solutions can help you connect, enhance and deliver information across diverse operating systems, applications and legacy systems. You can discover and understand new information sources, relationships and business contexts, then enable high-value data as services.

You can manage and deliver unstructured information to support human-centric decision making. You can leverage master data management to improve your understanding of customer and product information across internal business units.

And, with the ability to transform data from transactional systems, data warehouses, XML streams and other sources into information, you can leverage SOA data services to enable rapid response to changing conditions.

With the right information services and accelerators in place, decision makers at all levels can access authoritative personalized and trusted information delivered in a timely, security enriched manner.

Okay. That's information. Let's take a look now at the process entry point. Organizations focused on process want to streamline operations, improve efficiency, provide consistency or ensure regulatory compliance by automating key processes.

To that end, a variety of integration technologies are often leveraged across an enterprise almost invariably resulting in inflexible operating environments. And that leads to high cost and poor adaptability to change.

IBM process automation solutions deliver a unique SOA-based integration framework that can help you simplify the way IT supports the business.

You can automate business processes with common models that connect, map and execute underlying services. You can simplify integration and automation of business processes by leveraging existing IT assets as reusable services. And reconfigure services quickly and economically in response to rapidly changing opportunities and threats.

With the right process automation framework in place, organizations can optimize their processes, deploy them on the fly and monitor the effectiveness of altered processes in near real time, without the complexities associated with traditional integration methodologies.

All right. We've seen information and process. So how about the people entry point? Organizations focused on people are interested in improving collaboration and productivity by giving users personalized consolidated ways to interact with other people and information in the context of business processes.

To this end, employees, trading partners and even customers need role-based intuitive and adaptive user interfaces. IBM Portal Solutions can serve as a foundational starting point to SOA, helping you provide insightful views of key business processes by aggregating timely information from a variety of sources in ways that make sense for individual users.

You can hide underlying complexities to simplify the user experience and present composite application views on the screen. And as experience and comfort levels increase, you can use alert driven SOA based dashboards and scorecards that are tied to a broader spectrum of processes enabling tighter management of business performance.

With the right portal solution framework in place, organizations can improve decision making and gain new competitive advantages by leveraging real-time technologies to give users easier access to the information they need when they need it.

Which entry point makes the most sense for you? It depends on your business priorities and which investments will mean the most to your bottom line. No matter which way you go, IBM can help you design an approach that's right for you.

And while pursuing integration of people, processes and information as separate projects can produce great benefit, there's a multiplier effect associated with applying SOA to two or more in combination. It's really the multiplier effect that can accelerate game-changing innovation.

So what are you waiting for? Find innovation through SOA by leveraging people, process and information entry points enabled by IBM. You've taken the quick tour, now just click the link on the screen to learn more.

[END OF SEGMENT]