review - Out of the Box web services

NOTE: This 2007 draft blog post is being published in 2022; it may be incomplete and the information is certainly out of date.

Out of the Box by John Hagel III

# Hardcover: 240 pages
# Publisher: Harvard Business School Press (October 28, 2002)
# Language: English
# ISBN-10: 1578516803
# ISBN-13: 978-1578516803

The full title is Out of the Box: Strategies for Achieving Profits Today & Growth Tomorrow Through Web Services

The bottom line is that managers needs to develop more flexibility and collaboration capability to deliver continuing rounds of operating cost and asset savings as well as accelerated growth.  They need to escape from the high cost and inflexible infrastructures that make both cost reduction and growth such daunting challenges.

This book discusses how a new generation of IT and related architectures--known generally as Web services technology and distributed services architectures--will provide a significant catalyst in helping management break out of the boxes that confine it today.

The book is mainly targetted at managers, and talks mostly about business transformation challenges.  I liked the emphasis on bringing more flexibility to all aspects of business.  It doesn't talk about Service-Oriented Architecture directly at all, although it does talk sometimes about "Web service architectures".

If you're a manager and looking for ideas about how to transform your business, taking advantage of new technology and new IT processes, this would be a good book to read.