‎'‎For the last 40 years‎,‎ business has viewed IT as its principal tool to increase productivity‎,‎ and rightly so‎.‎ Industries as diverse as retailing and financial services have been transformed by technology‎,‎ especially when used in a networked way‎.‎ Yet very often‎,‎ IT has constrained the evolution of those business processes by imposing rigid technology implementations on them‎.‎ And even worse‎,‎ as IT has grown and become more important‎,‎ it has become more complex and difficult to manage‎,‎ especially in larger enterprises‎.‎ In some cases the sheer complexity of the IT environment has started to limit the ability of companies to innovate‎.‎ However‎,‎ as Paul Allen shows‎,‎ recent advances in IT processes and technologies‎,‎ especially service‎-oriented architectures are starting to free companies up from these constraints‎,‎ and allow them to once again align their IT processes in support of their business processes‎.‎ Service Orientation‎:‎ Winning Strategies and Best Practices charts the course for handling what promises to be as profound a change to IT as any that has occurred in the last few decades‎.‎‎'‎ John A Swainson‎,‎ President and CEO‎,‎ CA