Corporate information is skyrocketing in business values; for enterprise, what is best practice for developing and maintaining goals and standards to enhance information management and business operations? The growing need to incorporate and exchange information across n- works has driven corporations to establish infrastructure for high-distribution communities in a timely and safe manner. Service-Oriented Enterprise (SOE) is lauded as a mainstream business-information collaboration solution due to its decentralized, loosely coupled, and highly interoperable nature. Through SOE, composite applications can be created, modified, and removed in a dynamic use of services. This allows corporate information to be abstracted from existing applications and data, and creating new possibilities for assets to be either provided by external platforms or provisioned from external sources. Within a business/commercial paradigm, SOE translates to a set of flexible services and processes that an organization wishes to make available to its customers, partners, and/or associates. From a technical perspective, SOE evolves existing integration concepts into the notion of a contract – a technology-neutral and business-specific representation of the function. The history of the term network-centricity has represented different p- ceptions in the realm of enterprise services. In such traditional Information Technology (IT) domains as the telecommunications industry, networking has comprised a complex and expensive asset-management effort for service carriers. Network operators are consistently challenged to manage techno- gies and associated procedures that are continually growing and changing. Efficiency of resource management via network-centricity has widely been regarded as acornerstone of business assurance. ix x Preface
