Event-driven SOA allows companies to anticipate or predict customer needs, make faster decisions, and take action that benefits the business and its stakeholders. No matter what your industry, business velocity continues increasing exponentially.

The IT profession is at a turning point. One group of IT practitioners already knows what needs to be done - but the traditionalists call it radical. And the traditionalists continue to apply the same old ways of doing things that result in the same old horrendously expensive multi-year projects that produce systems barely better than what was there before, if they even work at all.

To be agile is to have the ability to move quickly, with suppleness, skill and control. It's a noble ambition for CIOs, but it's unachievable as long as IT's role is unchanged. Recent research on agile IT organisations boils down to a recommendation that IT be transformed to operate like a business, much like an external service provider.

By now everybody has heard over and over how governance is critical to the success of any SOA Implementation. Companies implementing SOA must provide the proper level of governance required to achieve reuse and flexibility without negatively impacting their team's ability to innovate and be agile.

Regardless of business model, every organisation has challenges when it comes to offering multiple products and services through multiple channels to a large customer base. More and more organisations are turning to new approaches in business process management to solve these challenges.

The most powerful player in the 21st-century global IT supply chain is the business end user. All the other players in the chain -- in-house IT organisations, IT vendors, resellers and consultants -- need to position themselves to best respond to end users' needs. That's because end users now have so many options.