Practical Service Level Management: Delivering High-Quality Web-Based Services

Chapter 1. Introduction

The World Wide Web—the Web—is the catalyst for the changes in our communications, work styles, business processes, and ways of seeking entertainment and information. The Internet is just the transport infrastructure for the web-based services that drive so much innovation. Note, however, that the Internet generally gets all the credit. As Thomas Friedman writes in The Lexus and the Olive Tree:

The Internet is going to be like a huge vise that takes the globalization system that I have described—and keeps tightening and tightening that system around everyone, in ways that will only make the world smaller and smaller and faster and faster with each passing day.

This is an accurate description of the environment that most ...