3.10. What is IT's role if all of this comes to pass? What does my company look like then? All right, let's fast-forward for a moment and assume you have a fully realized Enterprise Services Architecture in place. The Enterprise Services Repository has been built and populated, composite applications have been assembled and reassembled from the functionality of your old enterprise software, and your CIO has redubbed herself "chief process innovation officer" because her job ceased to be about wrangling IT resources and morphed into the oversight of gradual, continual tweaking of seamlessly integrated business process steps. Perhaps a chief IT officer is focused on that sort of work. Oh, and your employees in the trenches no longer pass around spreadsheets via email or tortuously retype data from one application to another (introducing the occasional critical error along the way). They're busy responding to the red alerts dispatched by various parts of an event-driven process automation humming along smoothly in the background, such as tactical analytical tools that filter discrete sets of data until some threshold is met, which automatically trigger the alert. This is your business on ESA. So, what's changed? The conventional org chart has ceased to matter. Once business processes took center stage in discussions of how the company should operate and be organized, traditional corporate departments began to melt away and re-form along functional lines. Politics and inertia impeded this evolution a bit, of course, but ultimately the corporate structure evolved to mirror the underlying IT. Just as ESA freed functionality from application silos, it also freed employees from their personal silos so that they could participate in the sort of concurrent engineering outlined earlier and made possible by ESA. The IT department as you knew it has ceased to exist. Responsibility for simple adaptation of applications has passed into the hands of business analysts, who are using modeling tools and a fully developed business semantics language to manipulate composites and their underlying objects as needed in the course of business. IT's role is now split almost evenly between consolidating noncore systems in search of cost reductions and recomposing services for use by business analysts. (We discuss business analysts and the new role for IT in detail shortly.) The organization may have explicitly reorganized into departments of consolidators and composers. These developments have helped foster a culture of innovation in which rank-and-file employees feel more empowered than ever before. Freed from repetitive drudgery and awarded a broad view of the business processes in which each one participates, they've been conditioned to believe that their suggestions can make a difference in the development of a new product or in the optimization of a process. And because IT exists to implement their suggestions quickly, they're encouraged by the instant gratification to be always on the lookout for further optimizations. In other words, ESA has decentralized decision making by handing the tools to the line managers, and it has effectively increased the metabolism of the company by rewarding productivity that wasn't possible before. These processes have expanded far beyond the nominal boundaries of the enterprise to incorporate suppliers, retailers, partners, and customers. The business semantics ESA provides offered a lingua franca with which to speak to third parties about aligning supply chains and contract manufacturing, point-of-sale data and market research, and sales channels that are being discovered, ramped up, or phased out all the time. Each company creates its own service-based ecosystem and learns to participate in the ecosystems of others.
The transformation is incremental and punctuated, but across all dimensions, it takes the same shape, moving from efficiency to flexibility and resulting in a new potential for innovation in processes and business models. |
