So just what does a contemporary business-technology architecture look like? There's no single model, but most typically involve defining the many elements that comprise a company's computing environment--operating systems, middleware, applications, PCs, servers, LANs, and routers--and visually representing how the pieces relate to one another, both in the virtual world of standards and interfaces and in the physical world of data centers and branch sites. Applications designed to manage IT architectures, such as those from Ptech Inc., increasingly represent business processes and organizational structures as well, evidence that computing infrastructures and the people and processes that use them have become inextricably meshed.

Motorola has embarked on what Redshaw calls a service-based architecture, where business requests for IT support are delivered as reusable services based on XML and other Web-services standards. In one of its first Web-services projects, involving an extranet used by Motorola's telephone-company customers, an application was created in half the time and at a third of the cost of original projections. A second, involving an enhancement for the sales and operations of Motorola's infrastructure business, was 30% under budget and 30% faster than expected.

"It's got to be faster, better, cheaper right out of the gate," Redshaw says. "It's all about radically improving the output of IT."

In these early tests, Motorola is evaluating tools for developing and managing Web services from Asera Inc. and Avinon Inc., with the expectation that Web services will become its standard way of developing and deploying software. Asera touts its "composite applications" as being so flexible that users without programming skills can modify the apps to suit their needs and even create their own Web services. "If you have 20 Web services, that's pretty useful," Redshaw says. "If you have 200, that's fantastically useful."

The need to deliver products that adapt more easily to evolving architectures hasn't escaped the attention of software companies. Microsoft and Siebel Systems Inc. last month disclosed a joint development project that involves tuning Siebel's applications to run on Microsoft's .Net operating systems and middleware, so their customers don't have to do the labor-intensive work themselves. Siebel also unveiled what it calls its Universal Application Network, a software platform with a built-in, vendor-neutral integration layer.

Bill Gates, Microsoft's chief software architect, says his company will seek out more arrangements like the pact with Siebel. The goal isn't only to ease the pain of application integration--which is acute for many IT departments--but to actually make it so easy that businesses will look for value-adding ways to link data sources. Web services, Gates says, have less to do with changing IT architectures than with filling gaps "where there was no architecture."

Eastman Chemical Co. thinks its new service-based architecture can lead to improved customer service, lower costs, more adaptability for new strategies--and even business growth. Keith Sturgill, manager of application and technology services at Eastman Chemical, says growth will come in the form of new channels to market, both local and global, made possible by E-commerce processes defined within the architecture. Lower costs, he says, will result from better use of installed applications and infrastructure, improved process and data visibility, and movement toward "a more real-time enterprise."