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“In early 2007, the bank estimated that the SMS program had saved customers
around £32 million in overdraft fees. The program has proven so popular that
other banks in the UK, such as Nationwide, have begun to follow suit.”

Key Findings

• The fundamental purpose of notification is immediate information
  dissemination. When a business event (any happening that is meaningful to the
  business) occurs, the news is sent to one or more people, systems or devices to
  whom the event is relevant.
  
• The use of EDA in mainstream business processes and application design has
  lagged where it should be because analysts, architects and software engineers
  sometimes fall back on more-familiar batch or data-centric design patterns where
  EDA would have worked better.
  
• EDA is the foundational design pattern in many of the processes used in
  agile enterprise, zero-latency enterprise and real-time enterprise strategies.
  Companies will use EDA more as they evolve toward always-on, continuous
  processes that respond more quickly to customer requests, competitors' moves and
  other events in the internal or external environment.

Recommendations

• Use EDA in circumstances where people, systems or companies must react
  quickly to external stimuli whose timing or nature cannot be fully anticipated.
  
• Use one-event-at-a-time EDA for implementing asynchronous applications,
  straight-through processing (STP) and some data synchronization scenarios.
  
• Use complex-event processing (CEP) — the computational aspect of event
  processing — to distill the information value from multiple events.

The common alternatives to EDA are:

• Disconnected "islands" of information
  
• People or systems connected through batch data transfer
  
• People or systems that share a common database

Some examples of EDA use scenarios include:

• Database synchronization
  
• Updating information with a business partner
  
• STP
  
• Partially automated processes
  
• Monitoring and situation awareness

EDA brings obvious benefits:

• It hastens the response to significant events by reducing "information
  float" — that is, the time between when new information is captured or detected
  in one place and when it becomes available for use elsewhere.
  
• It improves the quality of the response by eliminating situations where
  decisions are made without the most current data.

EDA also brings some less-obvious benefits:

• Processes can be monitored more closely using business dashboards and other
  BAM mechanisms, because notification messages can be readily tapped as a source
  of information about the progress of the work flowing through a system.
  
• The elapsed time of a process can be reduced by running some activities
  concurrently, because a notification can be delivered to multiple people or
  systems simultaneously.

Key Findings

• Many organizations are still confused about which combination of products to
  select for their WCM solutions.
  
• Gartner estimates that 30% of WCM initiatives go over budget or do not
  achieve their goals because they don't adhere to established best practices.
  
• Economic uncertainty and the pressure to cut costs are leading to increased
  scrutiny of available WCM solutions and of their deployment.

Recommendations

• Identify, quantify and document the goals of your WCM solution.
  
• Utilize a maturity model to assess the level of change that your WCM
  solution will require.
  
• Establish a road map that spans the phased achievement of highest-priority
  goals and longer-term, strategic goals before you select the products for your
  WCM solution.
  
• Follow the best practices outlined in this document in addition to those
  more commonly adopted in the industry.

The Key Issues for SOA governance technologies in 2008 are:

1. How do registries/repositories, policy management and SOA validation
   technologies interoperate, integrate and federate to enforce SOA governance
   strategies?
   
2. How do IT and SOA governance organizations leverage SOA governance
   technologies to enforce policies?
   
3. Which vendors provide technologies for the enforcement of SOA governance
   strategies?

Key Findings

• 
  DITA-aware content creation and management applications are available now. Twenty percent of organizations will use such applications within the next four years.
  


• 
  Publishing departments are the first to adopt DITA. Others will follow as DITA success stories grow, and cost and time savings are documented.
  


• 
  Existing users of XML-aware content applications will move to DITA-based applications to increase content "shareability" and improve content "reusability."
  


• 
  Using DITA can save time and money, as it identifies content to be used throughout the content life cycle.
  

Recommendations

• 
  Investigate DITA case studies to understand how those successes can be duplicated.
  


• 
  IT should work with different business units to identify reasons why particular organizations should adopt DITA.
  


• 
  Business units and IT organizations should collaborate to determine when and how to implement DITA. Enterprise architects and applications managers will play key roles