How to Transform Your Business; The game plan: integrate isolated systems. The key player: clean, interoperable data.

You've heard the buzzwords: service-oriented architecture and enterprise service bus. But those terms refer only to the technology, not the critical steps that companies must take to maximize the promise of business transformation, e.g., freeing their systems from isolated applications and migrating them to highly reliable and immediately available services.

Transformation involves building new systems that resemble existing applications and will ultimately displace them, without a large increase in I.T. spending. The transformed systems must have reliability, integrity, security, economy, ease of use and Google-like response. More important, though, the data in use by these …