I touched the
concept of Service on Demand in mid
90s when I worked for IBM. Some of our folks had worked on TV on Demand as well
back then. This is becoming popular in real life now after 20 years.
Service Oriented
Architecture (SOA) is the foundation to enable the service on demand. The basic concept of SOA is illustrated in the
following figure:
Now, Internet
is playing the service registry role that connects service providers with
service consumers by the help from search engine. The service providers and service
consumers can be both organizations and individuals. The evolution of this
service model has greatly challenged the infrastructures of our society; affect
both business enterprises and our daily lives.
Currently, our
social infrastructures are formed to organize the resources and service
providers into business entities. People, as skilled resources or service
providers, work for business entities to take advantages from business
infrastructures provided as common services for effective production with
collective benefits. Businesses are responsible in selling products to their consumers.
Therefore, businesses are the service
brokers in this picture. With business brokerage service function being
available on Internet, the traditional business structure and operation model
will be challenged. We have seen the trend that more people are leaving big
business organizations, and begin to work as individual via Internet.
At the meantime,
Internet provides an environment for service organically growth, where the best
will survive and mediocre will disappear naturally along time. This is the
ecosystem of service on demand.
