Ch. 6 Reflections

In chapter 6 the author talks about the architecture of IS systems in a business and how the business strategy must align itself with the architecture and infrastructure for the company's IS system to be successful. Again this ties back into the authors first notion that the business, organizational, and IS strategy must be aligned. In looking at the different IT architectures companies can choose from to align their business strategy with, there is a growing debate on whether to use service-oriented architecture (SOA) or web-oriented architecture (WOA). I found this article on a ZDNet Blog by Joe McKendrick. In the article McKendrick talks about how WOA seems to be winning out over SOA because of its bottom-up mentality. Meaning that because WOA has so much possibility to start small and to be able to expand into a much larger system thus growing with the company. It is a interesting take and I am sure it will be the clear winner for now until the next big IT architecture breakthrough comes along.

Ch. 5

In chapter 5 the author talks about E.R.P. (enterprise resource planning) where it connects important information to all employees in the company. I came across a power point presentation from a student at NTNU a Norwegian technology college that goes further with this topic and discusses the integration of ERP and web 2.0 and how using these two systems will help disseminate information not only to the employee but also the consumer.

Ch. 4

In thinking about chapter 4, I was watching Fox 25 news one morning and they were speaking with a author who struck a chord in what ch. 4 was partially about, collaboration. The book was Throwing sheep into the boardroom, and the author talks in the interview about how businesses can use social networking sites to have existing employees of say the baby boomer generation to be able to connect to a new employee of the millenial generation who currently uses and is entrenched in this new technology, I definitely look forward to reading this book, check out the interview.