Collectively, infrastructure and operations teams, along with application developers and others, perform service engineering tasks that follow the fundamental principles of systems engineering. For some reason, however, infrastructure and operations professionals have a tendency to think of themselves as the "working class" of IT.

Firms can eliminate this stereotype and foster the intellectual prowess of employees by fundamentally changing the way that the roles are perceived. By instead referring to infrastructure professionals as technology engineers, and operations professionals as process engineers, firms can empower employees to establish themselves as innovators and produce creative solutions to common business challenges.

Step 3: Develop Fundamental Service Brokering and Integration Skills

With recent growth in strategic rightsourcing, firms increasingly find themselves building business services using components provided by third parties. These services can be in the form of software components in SOA, cloud services, traditional outsourcing, and other services not performed by internal staff. The ability to integrate these components, along with internal service components, will quickly become a high-demand skill set.

In the vision of successful , service components will use Web-based services to link a dynamic system together. In order to construct truly adaptive business services, firms must leverage service component switching to alter the behavior or cost structure of a service by manipulating the service components themselves.