SOA at the “Structural Break”
Posted on 06. Apr, 2009 by vbrown in Enterprise Architecture, SOA
Those of us who are IT strategists and practitioners – and especially if we’re SOA advocates – can gain some critical insights from an excellent article in the McKinsey Quarterly by Richard Rumelt.
Rumelt is Professor of Business and Society , Anderson School of Management, University of California at Los Angeles. In his article, he describes the concept of a structural break – “. . .a phrase from econometrics, where it denotes the moment in timeseries data when trends and the patterns of associations among variables change.” He makes a compelling case that we’re in the midst of one, now, and suggests how we might craft strategies for seizing the inevitable opportunities that emerge from the chaos.
I’ll leave it to you to read the full text of Professor Rumelt’s article at http://tiny.cc/lzWEQ, and I highly recommend it. What I’d like to explore here is a specific, actionable lesson that I drew from the article.
An Actionable Lesson
The article is enlightening and in many ways exciting, on a global scale. But as an IT strategist and enterprise architect, one of my takeaways is directly related to what I practice on a daily basis – service-enabling my client’s enterprises (SOA/SOE). One of the characteristics of these historic events in history is the dramatic shifts that occur in the business and economic ecosystems. Indulge me in one more quote:
Structural breaks render obsolete many existing patterns of behavior, yet they point the way forward for some companies and at times even for whole economies. The Long Depression of 1893-97 marked the end of the railroad boom, for example, and the start of the transition to an economy based on sophisticated consumer goods. Milton Hershey built his early chocolate brand and distribution advantages in the middle of those hard times. GE was a product of the same period, for the structural break also marked the rise of anew economy based on electricity.
The message I kept reading between the lines was that one of the keys to survive and prosper in these times is the agility that we’ve been espousing for the past ten years of the SOA “movement.” Many of the businesses who have found themselves on the wrong side of a structural break failed because of the rigid structures and infrastructures that they depended on to support their business models. They were unable to adapt quickly and make the requisite changes to adapt to the new reality on the other side of the break.
SOA as Strategy
I believe that the advantages we get by implementing service/component-based IT infrastructures – the foundation on which our information economy is built – will enable us to adapt and capitalize on the opportunities that a structural break offers. Componentized IT ecosystems will allow us to change quickly, and to adopt flexible business models that can thrive in the new economic and business ecosystem.
So… for me, the current crisis and the perspective offered by Professor Rumelt, is a strong and practical call to action — to accelerate initiatives to modernize our IT ecosystems. We must ensure that our IT infrastructures are capable of supporting the business agility and flexibility that’s essential to survival across this and future Structural Breaks.
Please let me know what you think.
How can we, as IT professionals and leaders make meaningful contributions to the recovery and health of our companies?
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