Chapter 1 CHAPTER ONE Motivation W E LIVE IN HARD TIMES . T HE SOCIAL MARKET ECONOMY IS BEING REPLACED BY A GLOBAL MARKET economy, and the marketing guys rule the world. As a consequence, you have to be fast and flexible to survive. It’s a renaissance of Darwinism: It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the ones most responsive to change. The key is flexibility. For all major companies and large distributed systems, information technology (IT) flexibility is paramount. In fact, IT has become a key business value enabler. At the same time, processes and systems are also becoming more and more complex. We have left the stage where automation was primarily a matter of individual systems, and are fast moving toward a world where all those individual systems will become one distrib- uted system. The challenge is maintainability. It turns
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