The demand on enterprises to be leaner, to have greater agility, to be more efficient, and at the same time to surpass customer expectations is growing continuously with the competitive market. Enterprises have been increasing their spending steadily in IT. In fact, Forrester Research says that in 2007, "enterprises expect to increase their IT budgets by 3.8 percent, up from a 3.2 percent planned increase at this time last year." This huge amount of money that goes into IT results in tools that are often disparate and not familiar to the end users who need to learn to use these complicated line-of-business (LOB) applications. More often than not, end users are most comfortable working in Microsoft Office environments and interfaces than in these older, traditional LOB systems that have a very steep learning curve and require a lot of content switching, like copying and pasting, which result in work inefficiencies and general loss of productivity. One example of this happens when a salesperson needs to go into several different systems to update his customer’s information after the sale has been made. Mistakes are made, and often the task is forgotten. This is one reason why 42 percent of customer relationship management (CRM) licenses that are purchased are never actually deployed (Gartner Group) and why 57 percent of SAP customers don’t believe they’ve achieved a positive ROI from their implementations (Nucleus Research). This is something that we call the "results gap"—the disconnect between IT solutions and the real workflow of the information worker.

While LOB systems are foundational to enterprise productivity, it’s important to step back and ask what the source of the competitive factor and profit driver for the company is. Is it the LOB systems or is it the people—the individuals completing the sales, the employees meeting with customers, and those creating the products? I believe it is the people who drive businesses since it is the employees who create the customer leads, who raise the bottom line, who innovate, who develop strong customer relationships, and who improve operations. Once we’ve identified the source of the competitive factor and profit driver, it would be wise to start building the processes and applications around the source and make the technology support the people rather than make the people conform to the software and infrastructure. There is no need to throw out any existing investments; it would be best to leverage our current investments and bridge the gap between the back-end and the front-end applications.

Across organizations, and for all information workers, there is the problem of too much data in too many disparate places. Enterprises have data stored in their LOB systems, in their corporate portals, on employees’ hard drives, in e-mail, in records repositories...we are in the era of information overload. One of the big challenges that IT faces today is giving end users the ability to work productively by not requiring them to go to all of the systems in which the enterprise has been invested. Creating solutions based on Software + Services results in systems that bring data from all these systems together into one application, so that while the reality is that all this data still exists, managing the data becomes easier.

IT departments have long suffered with the problem of deploying fixes and updates to each employee in the organization. Luckily, this is a challenge that is easily solved by creating solutions based on S+S as a result of the natural code reuse inherent in the architecture. The code is centralized so if a fix needs to be made to the service, this automatically gets picked up by the clients with no interruption to the application.

With the challenges that enterprises face today, like getting a positive ROI from their existing LOB systems, challenging IT to create solutions that mimic the real information worker processes, not just those of the LOB system, and unifying all of our disparate systems to combat information overload, it is easy to see why enterprises are starting to turn to a more agile, service-oriented approach that works around the information worker. So how do we get from disparate, hard-to-use systems to integrated and interoperable applications? That’s where S+S and OBAs enter the picture.