The Grid Enterprise — Structuring the Agile Business of the Future

Abstract

Information technology (IT) spending remains depressed as organisations look to exploit their existing systems, squeezing out the last drops of benefit to bolster their financial cases. However, at some point the law of diminishing returns will cut in as infrastructure gets older and the needs of business agility stretch the bounds of existing systems. As a result, companies will start to look for the next wave of technology that will help them both upgrade their capacity and improve their agility. Many analysts have identified grid computing and Web Services as the core technologies to support this wave, variously describing it as ‘organic IT’ and the ‘real-time enterprise’. However, there is a broader convergence of both these two technologies with the techniques of business process management that appears to offer even greater benefit. This paper examines the drivers of organisational agility and the corresponding demands on a Web Services-based infrastructure. It identifies the shortfall in current Web Services solutions and highlights how a service-oriented architecture can overcome them. It extends this architecture to incorporate both business process management and grid computing and concludes by deriving a future form for the truly agile enterprise.