Services Blueprint: Roadmap for Execution

Despite contrived terminology, such as "digitization", this book truly lives up to its title because the authors provide both a blueprint for services in today's economy, and a roadmap for making it happen. The authors stay focused on business instead of technology. More importantly, they show how to shed outmoded thinking about business processes and supporting systems, and highlights how you should be viewing the marriage of services and processes to be successful. The essence of this book is in the authors' equation, Services Blueprint = Focal Point + Services + Processes + Applications. The ten core focal points given in this book clarify one or more critical success factors to any business, and the clear advice for executing to achieve objectives associated with focal points is invaluable.I like the way the authors distill a set of complex, interrelated elements into a coherent approach. For example, they breakdown service blueprints into types (three major ones); provide execution methods that aligned to organizational goals, and reinforce these using case studies from well known corporations. In addition, the discussions of processes, application integration, and how to tie everything together into a coherent view and execution strategy is among the most realistic and clearly articulated I've come across. I also like the way the authors support Six Sigma in the design and implementation of processes. If you are not familiar with Six Sigma, the clear and succinct treatment in the book will provide everything you need to know to understand its value. Of course, it will not teach the associated techniques to the point where you can effectively apply them.Overall, this book is cuts to the key issues and challenges to align a business to today's economy. The approach is not only sensible and realistic, but the only one I've come across that 'gets it'.

The authors have done a fantastic job of illustrating how to design and implement digital business processes in the post dot-com era. This is one of the first books that truly gets into the concept of multi-channel business process design. The most useful part of this book was how it ties together the online digitial business strategy, composite business processes, and the emerging business process management platforms/systems areas. The book uses the concept of services to link the strategy side to the process side. This is emerging strategy being followed by SAP, Siebel, Peoplesoft, Oracle, IBM, HP and even Microsoft.The other good aspect of this book are the variety of best-practice case studies that truly illustrate what business problems, web services and services oriented architecture is meant to support. The case studies on J.C. Penney, Eastman Chemical, Nike, Wal-Mart, GM, McDonalds, New York Times Digital, Georgia Pacific, IBM were quite interesting.The audience for this book is defintely marketing, operations and IT managers who are trying to figure out what to do with their organization's different first generation portals. Most of the customer facing, employee facing and supplier facing portals built during the dot-com boom are out-dated and need to be completely overhauled. For those who are facing this problem, this book will be very useful. Highly recommend this book. It is thought provoking and insightful.

We are migrating to a services economy from a predominantly manufacturing economy. The authors articulate very well how e-business technology is evolving into service platforms vis-a-vis portals to jumpstart this transition. Very soon, we will be in a world full of digital self-services (remember ATMs for banking and self-service gas pumps?) delivered to your mobile handhelds, desktops, etc. What more, these services will be tailored to the specific needs of individuals (not something you see in ATMs and gas pumps). Business folks out there looking to cut costs will definitely relate to that, as personalized self-services delivered via portals is it to cut costs dramatically. You might say "no, BPO is the answer for cost cutting." Just remember BPO at the end of the day is also a service provided by one party to/on behalf of another. How do you think those BPO services will be delivered, especially when the BPO provider is thousands of miles away across the globe? Take a wild guess ... TWO THUMBS UP ... this book is both informative and fun to read ... kudos to the authors on a splendid job!