In conjunction with Enterprise Strategies, AberdeenGroup recently released a Benchmark Report on how to gain more value from your enterprise applications. It looks at everything from SOA-enabled versions of third-party applications to SOA toolkits.An executive summary of the report has been posted here & A full (and free) version of the report is available here.

Enterprise Systems has an interview with the author Peter Kastner (link)

Excerpts Here:

What are some of the IT trends that lead to this study?

One reason It isn't as agile as it should be is due to the poor integration between applications. For example, business process management isn't integrated well with the rest of IT. There are siloed applications connected with the software equivalent of chewing gum and baling wire. The silos were never designed for cross-application communications, and it is expensive to re-plumb the IT infrastructure. In fact, we found that those surveyed complain that they can't be flexible when integrating business processes, and the costs of this lead to trade-offs that, in turn, prevent yet other, important investments in IT. They get behinder and behinder.All this has led to serious end-user dissatisfaction. More than half of the enterprises surveyed report they are unhappy with the ROI of the investment in enterprise applications.

What is IT doing about the problem?
Some are focusing on best-of-breed functionality in applications they install. Otherws are looking into business intelligence capabilities. Service-oriented architectures are also a popular approach. No matter what the approach, the goals are the same: correct the break-fix cycle that has been hounding IT for over a decade.

Prashanth Rai