The enterprise’s business is succeeding and accelerating to a superior velocity, when the enterprise is interacting with and responding at great speed and in real-time to customers and partners, passing swiftly into the unfolding new opportunity, foreseeing and reacting innovatively to global market changes, and leveraging innovation to steer the business on the path for sustainable growth and profitability.

To attain a superior velocity in the enterprise business, it is crucial that the enterprise makes a fundamentally new approach for architecting the business, aligning and deploying the IT resources, and constructing a strong foundation for executing the business.

This undertaking calls for an enterprise-wide effort. It must engage the business stakeholders to collaborate with the IT teams and should address all the enterprise business automation layers – business, IT infrastructure, applications, event-driven information, and organizational structure. It is enterprise project that should be staged in carefully planned multi phases. It is an incremental journey that organizations need to take.

Here are the outlines of the key elements of the strategy:

• Construction of a total architecture for the enterprise – a holistic approach:

To attain a superior business velocity, it is crucial that the enterprise makes a fundamentally new approach to build and manage total architecture for the entire enterprise. A holistic approach for deploying the enterprise’s total architecture must be enforced where business processes, IT systems, information, and people must be architected collectively altogether and as a whole. This is in alignment with maintaining the symbiotic relationship between business processes, IT systems, information, and people that makes the enterprise operate and innovate. The four components fragmented and in separation they can’t achieve a thing of value.

Total architecture approach facilitates building an IT infrastructure that enables digitization and seamless automation of business processes and allows for high-speed deployment of new business services and goods. Construction of total architecture is critical for attainment of superior velocity in the enterprise business – for responding with high velocity to both market changes and business growth. Having a business core robustly automated and digitized, enterprises respond rapidly to customers and partners and pass swiftly into the unfolding new opportunity whereas their vulnerable competitors wobble and falter.

• Delivering the enterprise’s total architecture:

It is indispensable to apply a service-oriented approach to attain a total architecture for the enterprise. Thus a service-oriented architecture (SOA) organization should be in charge of delivering the total architecture and in providing the vision and road map for both business process architecture and IT systems architecture. The road map should address all the enterprise business automation layers – business, IT infrastructure, applications, and organizational structure. Such a leadership team should create the know-how and apply the tools needed to design, build and manage the enterprise’s total architecture. Therefore, these service-oriented enterprise architects are taken the challenge for construction of a strong foundation for high-velocity execution of the enterprise’s business.

Service orientation should be approached first as business architecture and modeling and a way to structure the enterprise. Then and only then it is approached as an IT integration technology. IT teams should work more directly with the business to define the strategic directions, the business processes and evolve the leadership. Business leadership and IT leadership are required to collaborate to define the enterprise-wide architecture. Alignment of the enterprise IT capacities with the business must take hold.

• Service oriented integration of the enterprise:

Service orientation implements an enterprise integration approach using service capabilities and technologies. It enables the enterprise to inventory and restructure its IT portfolio into building blocks of indispensable services primary for supporting business processes and operations. The great business value is obtained when a portfolio of business functionality is composed from reusable services that you can rapidly combine, and consume to build new business processes or to change your current processes.

Structuring and integrating the business as clusters of linked services is the huge business gain. Here it is crucial that the enterprise makes a fundamentally new approach to the way it builds and automates it business processes and constructs its business models and software. The ultimate goal is to enable the enterprise to deliver and consume most of its business applications and software capabilities as well designed reusable services. Many of current enterprise applications are monolithic and have evolved to become overly complex to be truly efficient and agile. A quick time to market (QTM) can be achieved only by creating a service oriented environment with agile and flexible business applications. Service orientation enables businesses to make effective decisions sustained by dynamic technology instead of arriving at limited business decisions constrained by IT technology.

• Innovating through services:

The great leverage is to make your lower-level building blocks services widely accessible, platform-independent and standardized. Such services are easily consumed and assembled for constructing and automating your existing business processes and for rapidly launching new processes for expanding the business. Service orientation replaces complex software and hardware dependencies with service modules that can be easily replaced, modified, assembled and deployed in a granular framework across a virtualized infrastructure. You are creating a portfolio of reusable services to architect your business processes – that is the big leverage.

This will lift up the overall quality of your business processes. It will greatly reduce the response time to the customers and partners, and open the doorway for superior business growth and profitability. It positions the enterprise to better respond to the highest priorities of the business – serving their costumers, engaging new business opportunities and innovating through new products and services.

BPM (Business Process Management) is one of the greatest applications that is enabled by service oriented design and creates superb ROI for your SOA project. It consumes those services by combining them together as steps in a business process flow without knowledge about the underlying details of the supporting SOA systems.

• Expanding via internal and external dynamic integration:

The IT infrastructure should be able to apply the service orientation approach, not only within the enterprise, but most importantly beyond the enterprise to facilitate integration between a company and its partners and customers. The enterprise IT should deliver more effective integration with business partners and use of external service providers, responsive interaction with customers, efficient supply chain cooperation, and greater global sourcing. This greatly improves the enterprise’s ability to respond to outside pressing demands, foresee customers’ needs, create new opportunities, and predict and prevent undesirable sudden events – attaining a superior business velocity.

The high business velocity IT ought to enable end-to-end automation of business processes throughout the entire extended ecosystem of partners, suppliers and customers encircling an enterprise. Composite business applications can be created to automate business processes that extend from your suppliers all the way to your customers. Reusable tested and well-tried services created to automate internal business processes can be extended outside the enterprise’s firewall and made directly available to partners and clients. Concerns unique to business-to-business transactions must be addressed when internal services are exposed outside the enterprise’s firewall. On the other hand, SOA can leverage the Internet and Internet-based standards to greatly simplify the way companies interact with their partners and customers. This unloads a gigantic responsibility off the partners’ shoulders and opens the doorway for a greater collaboration.

• Transforming the enterprise IT infrastructure:

The enterprise data center IT infrastructure must be optimized and transformed in order to support the service oriented totally architected enterprise. IT solutions must be deployed for:

1. tightly aligning the IT infrastructure and function with overall business goals, models and strategies. This is critical for pushing the business forward by adapting the IT infrastructure to support business performance.
2. correctly plat forming the data center to deliver the required QoS (quality of service) by choosing the optimum platform for each business application and workload. The correct platform should
1. deliver the business services at the required levels of performance, availability, reliability, security and cost efficiency,
2. have abundant scalability and capacity to meet expected future growth requirements,
3. be adaptable and integral element of the enterprise’s distributed IT environment, and
4. increase overall operational efficiency and maximize resource utilization of the data center
3. pushing the IT environment to a top efficiency:
1. maximizing resource utilization,
2. deploying virtualization technology and consolidating workloads to save big on costs to operate, manage, software-license, power, cool and house the data center,
3. lowering maintenance and overall operation costs,
4. simplifying and cutting cost of overall IT management,
5. improving the end user’s ability to interface with the applications,
6. establishing effective capacity planning disciplines, and
7. advancing disaster recovery capabilities.
4. mitigating business risk by investing in fault tolerance and high availability. And for
5. exploiting the elasticity of the cloud to host your business processes:
1. it should have immediate access to scalable, on-demand technology resources provided by the cloud, and
2. it should deliver enterprise-ready cloud applications – without compromising reliability, scalability, and security requirements.

IBM System z® mainframe is in the best position for providing uniquely robust environment on which to deploy and manage the service oriented totally architected enterprise.