Chapter THREE. Evolving Toward ESA


You might wonder, "What are we getting ourselves into with ESA? This isn't just about the technology, is it?" ESA isn't "just" about anything. ESA is about changing all dimensions of IT so that every dollar spent, every week of work, every project completed, moves a company toward a new world in which IT is transformed from a no to a yes. Too often today, the answers that IT must provide amount to a no to ideas for innovation. Can we change a process, integrate a partner, offer a new service, outsource a key function? If a project is too expensive or takes too long, the answer, in effect, is no.

However, most organizations would not be ready if IT were suddenly transformed to say yes because the flexibility of ESA expanded the world of the possible. It is similar to the situation that radio frequency identification (RFID) and other real-world awareness technologies present. If most companies instantly turned on RFID and began monitoring real-time information, a flood of data would fill up their databases and disk drives, but those organizations would be able to understand the value of the information in only a few domains at a time. Once the organizations understood the information, they would have to change their processes and systems to take advantage of it. How fast would this happen? Not fast. What would be the impact on the organization? Probably huge. What would a company look like afterward? Probably a lot more responsive, with a new set of processes oriented to sensing and predicting events and then rapidly responding.

ESA poses a similar problem. If IT became a yes, if anything were possible, what would it make sense to do? Of course, the answer would differ from firm to firm, but if the cost of adapting systems to meet new requirements and tailoring general-purpose processes to meet the specific needs of a firm were easy and cheap, it is not a stretch to imagine that the results would most likely be positive and the organization would be transformed.

But neither RFID nor ESA will happen in the blink of an eye. Both take time, and while the work to implement them takes place from the technology and application perspectives, companies that are seeking to maximize the benefit from these ideas will be asking questions about how the business perspective must change. If IT were more of a strategic tool, what sort of evolution of culture, of governance, of organizational structure will be necessary to win in the marketplace? How can ESA help achieve these objectives?

Chapter 2 made the business case for ESAthat it finally provides the platform and methodology for consolidating and reusing your existing IT investment to fund and drive business process innovation. Seen another way, it is also the summation of everything we have learned from more than 30 years of building and fine-tuning our current IT architecture. ESA is not just a vision for the next 30 years; it is already a reality today. Companies that learn to take advantage of that reality faster than their competitors do will find themselves not just with an old-fashioned advantage in total cost of ownership (TCO), but rather, with a strategic advantage in flexibility and clock speed.

Anyone eyeing ESA as just the latest and greatest set of software integration tools is being dangerously shortsighted, however; it's more accurate to describe ESA as a business process innovator, or even more accurately put, as a business process platform. Once adoption beginsespecially if there's enterprise-wide commitment from the startIT itself is integrated into your business strategy, and then corporate organizational units are integrated and redistributed along the lines of the actual business processes that drive the enterprise processes now embodied in your IT. Ultimately, the business itself is integrated into a larger, tightly knit ecosystem with your suppliers, partners, and customers, to the point where the boundaries between each are fluid and fuzzy as data flows unimpeded back and forth.

No, it's not just about technology or applications. It's about managing a comprehensive change management process, one that will affect virtually every aspect of your company. Only the foolhardy or young would attempt this without some well-organized worrying, but managing such processes successfully and actually changing the nature of a company create competitive advantage. Fortunately, change management is not a complete mystery. It may not be easy, but it presents some wisdom that we can draw on.

The first thing we must do is divide the challenge of ESA into its component parts. The three perspectives of ESAbusiness, application, and technologyalong with the five tactical levelsconceiving, consuming, composing, creating, and controllingprovide a way to organize our thinking into bite-size issues that can be addressed and understood. Trying to think about almost any ESA-related issue without a proper framework can lead to inefficient communication, or worse, bewildering confusion.

We cover the tactical levels of the application and technology perspectives in most of the chapters of this book. This chapter deals with the issues surrounding the tactical levels of the business perspective. How will a company change as it addresses the five Cs? What surrounding issues of culture, organizational structure, and change management must a company address? In addition to discussing these issues directly, we will also look to the example of SupplyOn, the automobile industry productivity hub that is creating standardized processes and services to connect OEMs and suppliers for direct procurement.

So, what are the concerns from the business perspective at a tactical level?




Enterprise SOA. Designing IT for Business Innovation
Enterprise SOA: Designing IT for Business Innovation
ISBN: 0596102380
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2004
Pages: 265

flylib.com © 2008-2017.
If you may any questions please contact us: flylib@qtcs.net