(Length: 7 pages)

Executive Summary (This is a document excerpt)

Within a service-oriented architecture (SOA), practitioners consistently confirm Forrester's contention that business services are best designed with a strong understanding of the business process context. This, in turn, requires a new model for the working relationship between business and IT. Historically, the business throws its needs "over the wall" to IT in the form of a requirements document. Instead, Forrester recommends taking a lesson from manufacturing's use of concurrent engineering. Using a model Forrester calls "concurrent business engineering," IT and the business can work jointly to simultaneously design both the business process and the technology solutions to support it. This provides the context needed to design the right business services and, more importantly, it enables an appropriate level of dialogue around — and tradeoff between — business and technology considerations. In the end, this will foster greater levels of business innovation and optimization.