The first step to achieving business agility is to “SOA-enable” your business applications. By “SOA-enable” I mean that the capabilities within each of your business applications should be delivered by a set of services in addition to the traditional application user interfaces. These services can be loosely coupled with those of other applications, to compose dynamic and agile business processes.
These dynamic business processes can be integrated with other business processes to create highly agile applications that enables your company to respond to changes in your business environment without requiring expensive and lengthy software development.
The good news is, if you have purchased enterprise application packages over the last few years then they should have been “SOA-enabled” using Web services technology. If they are not then get your vendor(s) to give you the service interfaces for your applications, this should be free if you have a support contact in place.