The expansion of corporate IT systems beyond the boundaries of the traditional enterprise and the dynamic nature of the competitive landscape are creating major business and technology challenges. New levels of competition and rapid technological evolution drive prices and operating margins downward, putting great pressure on IT service organizations to meet their bottom line commitments. Other imperative drivers evolving today demand company-wide collaborative processes to extend and optimize existing solutions. These new efforts are driven from business objectives such as new service development, system migration, business process re-engineering, workflow automation, outsourcing, collaborative commerce, et cetera. These challenges manifest themselves in a new business paradigm as the center of control shifts from traditional system based solutions to interoperable process based solutions.
Differences in business systems across an enterprise, whether due to internal divisions or acquisitions, work against establishing and maintaining an automated enterprise-level monitoring, reporting, control, and compliance capability. Partly automated or manual systems for compliance involving existing e-mail systems, checklists, spreadsheets, and so on may provide a short term solution, but will be too costly to operate in the long term, and will not be able to provide the needed level of ongoing SOA compliance.