Taylorism changed a lot about the nature of work in North American and western Europe pretty quickly, all things told … but it still took thirty or forty years to emerge into its relatively full-blown effects. At its heyday, the manufacturing might and effectiveness of the United States that Taylorism helped create enabled it (along with important agricultural and resources capabilities and growing financial clout) to become the world power economically over several decades at most.
In an important sense, it was useful to his theories that 1) they helped respond to the massive spread of the Industrial Era’s requirements for growth in the first half of the 20th century, and 2) World Wars I and II came along in the late 1910’s and in the late 1930’s to provide a massive need for manufacturing.
30+ years elapsed from the publication of Principles of Scientific Management in 1911 to the codification of those principles into work design methodologies in the 1940’s and early 1950’s. He and his theories get a bad rap today, but it seems clear that they were highly useful to the process of creating wealth by improving manufacturing processes and capabilities.
It seems banal to say that those theories are less effective today, but I am not sure that’s the case. There have been no comprehensive theories and principles come along (yet) to replace them, notwithstanding a plethora of management books published since the mid-1980’s promising enhance organizational effectiveness … more often than not by combining Taylorist principles with developmental workarounds and adaptations.
The recent emergence of the field called Enterprise 2.0, and clarion calls for management innovation that have followed (see Gary Hamel, Andrew McAfee, Tom Davenport, Don Tapscott, Dave Snowden and many, many others) promises much potential disruption. It also portends significant struggle as the forces of buttoned-and-battened-down efficiency derived from a manufacturing-focused era vie with the forces arising from networked flows of information in an era where economic value is derived from the construction and application of knowledge to product and service design and delivery (manufacturing happens in China now).
1. Replace rule-of-thumb work methods with methods based on a scientific study of the tasks.
2. Scientifically select, train, and develop each employee rather than passively leaving them to train themselves.
3. Provide "Detailed instruction and supervision of each worker in the performance of that worker’s discrete task".
4. Divide work nearly equally between managers and workers, so that the managers apply scientific management principles to planning the work and the workers actually perform the tasks
Management theory
Taylor thought that by analysing work, the "One Best Way" to do it would be found. He is most remembered for developing the time and motion study. He would break a job into its component parts and measure each to the hundredth of a minute.
[ Snip … ]
He was generally unsuccessful in getting his concepts applied and was dismissed from Bethlehem Steel. It was largely through the efforts of his disciples (most notably H.L. Gantt) that industry came to implement his ideas.
Managers and workers
Taylor had very precise ideas about how to introduce his system:
"It is only through enforced standardization of methods, enforced adoption of the best implements and working conditions, and enforced cooperation that this faster work can be assured. And the duty of enforcing the adoption of standards and enforcing this cooperation rests with management alone." (Taylor, Principles of Scientific Management, cited by Montgomery 1989:229, italics with Taylor)
Workers were supposed to be incapable of understanding what they were doing. According to Taylor this was true even for rather simple tasks.
"’I can say, without the slightest hesitation,’ Taylor told a congressional committee, ‘that the science of handling pig-iron is so great that the man who is … physically able to handle pig-iron and is sufficiently phlegmatic and stupid to choose this for his occupation is rarely able to comprehend
[The scope of] Taylor’s Influence - United States
Carl Barth helped Taylor to develop speed-and-feed-calculating slide rules to a previously unknown level of usefulness. Similar aids are still used in machine shops today. Barth became an early consultant on scientific management and later taught at Harvard.
H. L. Gantt developed the Gantt chart, a visual aid for scheduling tasks and displaying the flow of work.
Harrington Emerson introduced scientific management to the railroad industry, and proposed the dichotomy of staff versus line employees, with the former advising the latter.
Morris Cooke adapted scientific management to educational and municipal organizations.
Hugo Münsterberg created industrial psychology.
Lillian Gilbreth introduced psychology to management studies.
Frank Gilbreth (husband of Lillian) discovered scientific management while working in the construction industry, eventually developing motion studies independently of Taylor. These logically complemented Taylor’s time studies, as time and motion are two sides of the efficiency improvement coin. The two fields eventually became time and motion study.
Harvard University, one of the first American universities to offer a graduate degree in business management in 1908, based its first-year curriculum on Taylor’s scientific management.
Harlow S. Person, as dean of Dartmouth’s Amos Tuck School of Administration and Finance, promoted the teaching of scientific management.
James O. McKinsey, professor of accounting at the University of Chicago and founder of the consulting firm bearing his name, advocated budgets as a means of assuring accountability and of measuring performance.
I’ve long appreciated the aphorism that is the title of this post, and I think of it regularly when surfing and reading the latest insight from the many pundits and critics of the Web. And today I am thinking about "the future of work".
It’s my assertion that the changes social computing will bring to knowledge work and knowledge-based workplaces may be even greater than the generally immature experiments that have taken hold today as early adopters play with tools that allow them to connect, create, converse, convulse, coopt, and carry on about all manner of things … including work issues, challenges and opportunities.
David Weinberger is a well-known expert on knowledge management and the hyperlinked web / organization. He has from time to time written about how the digital infrastructure and the dynamics it fosters "cuts the slack out of interactions" (The Need For Leeway, October 2002) . We need "slack" to reflect, to think, to imagine, to support the filling in and filling up of the connections we have made between people, information, task and problems. And we need analysis and measurement, specialized skills, budgets, accountability and best practices to optimize work and eliminate what is clearly unnecessary, not useful and / or wasteful.
But efficiency is not and will not be the hallmark of human interaction, and human sociology in the modern workplace cannot forever take its architectural design principles for Taylorism. As we watch Enterprise 2.0 emerge, I watch what seem to be regular waves of dots (widgets, applications, platforms, services and people in equal measure) joining together, using the Web, to meld efficiency and slack … the "both / and" so often cited as characteristic of this new environment. A flow of questions, responses and pertinent information soldered together to provide a design, or a service, is not the same as carrying out efficient repeatable supervisable step-by-step tasks the result of which are combined with other sets of efficient repeatable supervisable step-by-step tasks to produce repeatable products or services (You can have any Model T you want, as long as it is black).
There’s an enormous amount of resistance, both intellectual and cultural, to acknowledging that maybe work cannot be designed and structured based on the principles that have been in place for more than three-quarters of a century now. A lot of that has to do with what "management" still means to us (especially the incumbents of managerial roles). It’s hard to give up power and control, especially when you are charged with making stuff happen and the budgets and performance management and compensation bonus schemes reinforce that charge. So, while it appears that the Internet, and thus the difficult-if-not-impossible-to-control flows of information, are here to stay, it also seems that about every 6 months or so there’s another wave of "this newfangled hyperlink stuff, personal publishing, connecting social-this-and-that is now officially over and it hasn’t yet changed the world".
Generally, I agree but with reservations. Those reservations are that "we tend to overestimate the impacts in the short term because we overlook all the details of how things are done and the tenacious stickiness of peoples’ habits, and tend to underestimate the impacts in the longer term because we overlook or ignore the scope and depth of accumulated change" (not verbatim).
In my opinion he puts none too fine a point on the fact that the Internet seems to be with us to stay, and that it’s impacts will continue to accumulate. Tomorrow’s workers won’t understand meetings, collaboration, supervision or accountability in the same way we do … all because of gin and that damned mouse.
… a British historian arguing that the critical technology, for the early phase of the industrial revolution, was gin.
The transformation from rural to urban life was so sudden, and so wrenching, that the only thing society could do to manage was to drink itself into a stupor for a generation. The stories from that era are amazing– there were gin pushcarts working their way through the streets of London.
And it wasn’t until society woke up from that collective bender that we actually started to get the institutional structures that we associate with the industrial revolution today. Things like public libraries and museums, increasingly broad education for children, elected leaders–a lot of things we like–didn’t happen until having all of those people together stopped seeming like a crisis and started seeming like an asset.
It wasn’t until people started thinking of this as a vast civic surplus, one they could design for rather than just dissipate, that we started to get what we think of now as an industrial society.
If I had to pick the critical technology for the 20th century, the bit of social lubricant without which the wheels would’ve come off the whole enterprise, I’d say it was the sitcom.
[ Snip … ]
I was having dinner with a group of friends about a month ago, and one of them was talking about sitting with his four-year-old daughter watching a DVD. And in the middle of the movie, apropos nothing, she jumps up off the couch and runs around behind the screen. That seems like a cute moment.
Maybe she’s going back there to see if Dora is really back there or whatever. But that wasn’t what she was doing. She started rooting around in the cables. And her dad said, “What you doing?”
And she stuck her head out from behind the screen and said, “Looking for the mouse.”
Here’s something four-year-olds know: A screen that ships without a mouse ships broken. Here’s something four-year-olds know: Media that’s targeted at you but doesn’t include you may not be worth sitting still for.
Those are things that make me believe that this is a one-way change.
Because four year olds, the people who are soaking most deeply in the current environment, who won’t have to go through the trauma that I have to go through of trying to unlearn a childhood spent watching Gilligan’s Island, they just assume that media includes consuming, producing and sharing.
[ Snip … }
I think that’s going to be a big deal. Don’t you?
Well, the TV producer did not think this was going to be a big deal; she was not digging this line of thought. And her final question to me was essentially, "Isn’t this all just a fad?" You know, sort of the flagpole-sitting of the early early 21st century? It’s fun to go out and produce and share a little bit, but then people are going to eventually realize, "This isn’t as good as doing what I was doing before," and settle down.
And I made a spirited argument that no, this wasn’t the case, that this was in fact a big one-time shift, more analogous to the industrial revolution than to flagpole-sitting.
I was arguing that this isn’t the sort of thing society grows out of. It’s the sort of thing that society grows into.
But I’m not sure she believed me, in part because she didn’t want to believe me, but also in part because I didn’t have the right story yet. And now I do.
… is that the contributors to this blog have for the past nine months or more been analyzing and opining upon the issues about Enterprise 2.0 takeup and implementation that are highlighted by this article in today’s ZDNet by Dennis Howlett.
Notwithstanding a substantial amount over the past two years of online and offline "press" about the Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 phenomena and the increasingly participative and interactive online environment (first for consumers and now increasingly apparent as "the" future for the workplace), decision-making about enterprise software in general continues to warily circle the issues involved with implementing community-based collaboration or more broadly defined, "social computing".
You’ll note that in the article (excerpt below) Dennis checks in with FASTForward’s Jevon Macdonald, who is of the opinion that Microsoft Sharepoint may well be the safe, "default" implementation of choice. Certainly Sharepoint has developed some key alliances over the past year that seem designed to support that point of view.
Here’s a You Tube video (also featured in Dennis’ article .. thanks for the pointer, Dennis) that presents a wide range of views on the question "Enterprise 2.0 - Hype or Happening?"
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Enterprise 2.0 - Hype or Happening ?
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In the ZDNet article Dennis (and Jevon) make a key point about value propositions. That said, getting an enterprise IT shop to listen seriously to the value proposition of a small startup is a key challenge in and of itself, regardless of how good it is.
I also believe (even after a decade or more of general agreement that functional stovepipes and silos are not helpful) that a large number of enterprises do not really know how to come to grips with regular and continuous flows of information across functional boundaries and throughout the organization. And it’s quite likely they won’t be able to come to grips with using such flows effectively (in any practical sense) until the architecture of their IT systems enables it and supports it, and the management learns, and practices with, using these flows to feed effective collaboration.
…as you know it. Right now I’m falling over startup vendors vying for attention in the so-called ’social software’ space. The fact enterprise people hate the term doesn’t seem to bother those who are bypassing IT as they sell into the marketing departments of companies at departmental budget prices. But there is a battle brewing on two fronts.
First, we have the mega vendors who think they ‘own’ the enterprise but have little clue what they’re doing when it comes to providing community style collaborative software. As Barry Libert, chairman of Mzinga said to me: “Does Microsoft have a relationship with me? Do any of the ‘monster’ vendors?” Second, we have the startups who are largely making their money by selling social media style solutions to marketers. While the two solution sets may look the same from the outside, they are being bought in fundamentally different ways and are setting up a tension that today is barely felt but which will have a disruptive effect on the software buying patterns of the future.
It is particularly appropriate that Phil Wainewright has penned an article dubbed Enter the socialprise as this plays directly to the themes I am currently exploring.
He says:
But enterprise computing is still designed for the old, stovepipe model in which every transaction took place within the same firm. There’s no connection with the social automation that’s happening between individuals.
[ Snip … ]
I then spoke to another Irregular, Jevon MacDonald who has been working in the so-called Enterprise 2.0 (aka socialprise) space for some time. He said that where the startups fail but where the incumbents succeed is in identifying a specific value proposition within specific industries.
His view is that Sharepoint will be a ‘big winner in the next five years.’ If the amount of noise being made by Microsoft is indicative, then it should be a winner. But…he also says: “Sharepoint deployments are horrendous and I really don’t know why people put up with them.”
Perhaps the most compelling prediction is the convergence between service oriented architecture (SOA) with Web 2.0 and SaaS — an Enterprise 2.0 stew ready for serving. Hence, Dion’s #1 prediction for 2008 is that “SOA finally goes pragmatic, Web-oriented, and lightweight.” Essentially, Dion is declaring that the Era of Big SOA is over. “Many of the ponderous, heavyweight SOA initiatives still in existence will finally refactor their design principles and then their architectures to be much more lightweight and RESTful. ”
The year 2008 will be a turning point for SOA, as it takes the Enterprise 2.0 route, Dion predicts. “One key driver is that organizations are increasingly tired of waiting for ROI on their SOA investments and the demand for change is pushing IT leaders to search for new, more effective approaches. Web orientation has enabled SOA on the greater Web on a vast scale and gained credence for a critical mass of the SOA community.”
Dion also observes that Enterprise 2.0 “will become a standard feature in most organizations.” E2.0 has arrived, he says. However, he adds, opinions will be divided on the impact of E2.0:
“The opinion on the results of Enterprise Web 2.0 will be colored by the preconceptions of those that observe them. The flattening of organizations, the non-hierarchical communication, the free and open exchange of information encouraged by Enterprise 2.0 platforms will be looked on as potentially disruptive by some and as a breath of freedom by others.”
Security will also be a top concern as the walls of enterprise IT become more “porous.” Dion predicts mixed results over the coming year in uptake of enterprise mashups and enterprise search, noting that organizations will continue to be plagued by vast, and most inaccessible silos of information. The wild, unchecked growth of unstructured data (especially blogs and wikis) within enterprises will only add to the challenge.
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“They’ve turned SOA into a huge infrastructure project that takes years to come to fruition, and in the meantime, the business people don’t get much of a look at what’s going on. In a way, Web 2.0 is the business peoples’ revenge.”
-Phil Wainewright
EbizQ’s Krissi Danielsson has published a great overview of my panel discussion with industry luminaries Phil Wainewright and Dana Gardner on “SOA and Web 2.0: Mashups, SaaS, and Collaboration: Putting the Pieces Together.”
Dana and Phil agreed to disagree on the speed of the Web 2.0 and SOA convergence — Dana sees the two paradigms as “complementary,” and noted that many of the Web 2.0 techniques around rapid front-end application development can be considered a form of “Guerrilla SOA.”
Phil, however, cautions that Web 2.0 may be too uncontrolled and ungovernable to blend in with more deliberate and planned SOA methodologies. “I think it’ll be a few years before Web 2.0 and SOA really coexist,” Wainewright said. “Web 2.0 is so ill defined and people are still using it to experiment rather than with a definitive purpose.”
Both Phil and Dana agree that the combined forces of SOA and Web 2.0 will be tremendous market disruptors.
Perhaps SOA and Web 2.0 can both be categorized as Web-Oriented Architecture, or WOA. Dana put it best when he suggested that WOA perhaps should be called “Watercooler-Oriented Architecture.” After all, is this not where the REAL communication and information gets exchanged within organizations? “The social nature of Web 2.0 technologies tends to increase the sharing of experiences and wisdom as well, almost making a Waterfountain Oriented Architecture, ” Dana pointed out.
My Web 2.0-SOA panel discussion, as well as the other eight sessions that were part of the “SOA in Action” conference, are archived for on-demand listening here. (Free registration required.)
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Thanks to a reader - Rob Lantz - I have discovered the Ernie Pyle of our time.
His name is Michael Yon. Michael works for no paper and lives off donations. He is writing the most compelling material of the conflict in Iraq.
Here is a taste - gripping and so human - so different from CNN
Off course the official Army hates him - but as you can see by this article - the guys love him. He is a real warrior, was in the Special Forces, who can pick up a weapon when it all goes wrong as it does in this story.
What’s really like on the ground for both US Troops - now moved out of the Green Zone and into the community - and for the Iraqis who live there - what do both really need from each other? Here Yon shows us a view not seen before by “Real” journalists who read the press releases in the Green Zone.
Without a paper behind him - he can tell the truth. The more we can publicize his work the more the truth can be told - a glimpse of the “Paper” of the future?
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If you’re not, take a look at a recent document I received from Scott Niesen, head marketer at Attensa. If you don’t know Attensa, you’re in for a treat. Their new feedreader tool sits nicely inside Outlook and brings a unique spin to feed reading via their “River of News” view and AttentionStream™ technology.
“Through ongoing analysis of AttentionStream™ data, including the time and frequency that feeds are accessed and articles read, deleted and ignored, Attensa displays feeds in a prioritized list based on the likelihood that they will be of interest to the reader. Subscriptions can be displayed in a “River of News” view that simulates a single news feed, regardless of how many RSS feeds”
And Scott and I had a good exchange about sharing some of Attensa’s inner RSS workings. When I told him I should just blog the whole document, he quickly fired back, that “marketing is all about experiments and a little risk.”
All major technology projects require a Return on Investment calculation that presumably shows the company making more money as a result of the implementation than it put into it. Of course, the “hard-dollar” numbers make for an easier sell to the C-level executives.
The problem with Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0, of course, is that the benefits delivered are “soft” benefits; there are few examples of hard numbers to show ROI.
New research out of Forrester says these hard numbers are hard to come by. (InformationWeek report here, InfoWorld report here.)
As I noted in a previous post, the vice president of engineering of Google and the CIO of McKesson both acknowledged at a recent presentation that Web 2.0 is, at this stage, unmeasurable — but that doesn’t mean it isn’t delivering value to the organization.
The Forrester report acknowledges as much, noting that there have been some tangible business benefits seen, such as a drop in support center calls because of rich Internet applications or a database system replaced by a corporate wiki. But the greatest advantages are seen in softer benefits, such as business efficiency and competitive advantage.
Forrester’s survey of 275 executives finds that 63 percent of those surveyed use total cost of ownership, ROI, or internal rate of return to measure the value of Web 2.0 tools.
The executives rank instant messaging as having the most value to their organizations. At the bottom of the list is blogging. IM was rated by 37 percent as delivering “substantial value,” while only 11 percent rated blogging as such.
One potential flaw in the study (at least from what the articles say) is that it limited its area of study to RSS, podcasting, wikis, social networks or blogs. These are the important communication tools of Web 2.0.
However, it would be interesting to see a study of the perceived value of the information processing platforms engendered through Web 2.0 — such as mashups or Software as a Service. Are executives having more success determining hard-dollar ROI from these approaches?
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TIBCO Software is easing the way for Ajax component interoperability with the donation this week of its core Ajax message bus technology to the OpenAjax Alliance (OAA) Hub project. TIBCO announced the donation today, at the same time as it released its PageBus, a related open source product.
What’s in it for you? Well, besides the technological benefits, developers could walk away with a 50-inch plasma TV or a 30-GB iPod, if they enter — and win — the Ultimate Mashup Ajax Challenge.
PageBus applies “publish and subscribe” message bus programming patterns within the context of a single Web page, allowing communication among multiple Ajax components. This allows developers to create composite applications from reusable parts and services. All of this is designed to reduce development costs, improve interfaces over HTML and increase business agility.
The message-bus approach solves one of the key problems that comes from combining increasingly sophisticated composite applications. As the number of composite applications and mashups increase, the programming — and needed event-driven reliability — required can increase exponentially.
What’s more, creating client-SOA applications becomes easier because the same conceptual architecture — publish and subscribe — is used for both rich Internet client (RIA) activities as well as for compositing backend services. TIBCO says it has large banks and other users delivering mission critical, real-time data through SOA backends to scads of Ajax-enabled components on RIA clients.
Users get a quick, rich experience, while developers and architects gain flexibility and speed-to-deployment. TIBCO gains by riding the wave of increased demand for back-end SOA integration and messaging infrastructure to support the RIA ramp-up.
TIBCO, as a member of the OAA, is working with more than 70 companies to standardize key aspects of Ajax. The OpenAjaxHub 1.0, the group’s first specification implementation, aims to provide Ajax interoperability through the publish/subscribe interface. The specification will formally be out in about six weeks, but the code is now at Sourceforge.net.
PageBus is open source and can be downloaded. It’s also shipped as part of the TIBCO Ajax Message Service.
The above-noted mashup challenge is a developer community project to build the world’s largest mashup using PageBus and TIBCO’s General Interface. The contest runs through September 30, after which TIBCO and co-sponsor Artima will award prizes for the best entries.
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Far as I know, most major league baseball teams have been profitable for many years, many decades. Most of the teams in large cities are doing better than ever, in spanking new stadiums.
What’s different now is the explosion of advertisements, endorsements, sponsorships, hucksterism and crass visual commercialism. Whether you attend a game or watch one on television, there isn’t a time or place where you are not treated to literally dozens of commercial pitches while you try and figure out the real pitches.
Why on Earth would people who love baseball, or even just tolerate baseball, allow such a plastering of advertisements across their consciousness (and perhaps unconsciousness)? Well, because they don’t have a choice, of course.
Baseball, like Microsoft (and soon, Google?), is a monopoly. There are few if any real choices for most anyone who wants to watch a major league game but to incur the ad wrath.
And that’s why it’s only a matter of time before Microsoft starts injecting scads of ads through their “software plus services” portfolio. That’s right, when you open your online (or offline or hybrid-line) applications for a spreadsheet, word processor, email, calendar, ERP interface — just like you’re now thoroughly accustomed to on Web pages and services — there will be ads. Lots of them. Targeted right to you as an individual or business (or both) with your pre-analyzed budget to spend in anticipation
Local, state, regional, mobile, location-based, keyword-oriented, and fuzzy-warm branding types of ads. All over your visual perimeter — just like at the ballpark — you’ll be served up ads, ads, ads while you toil away to offer more cookie crumbs of insight into what the next ad should be that you see. Attention!
The implications for this, of course, are enormous. If Microsoft and the other services providers — for they will all have to follow suit, just like each ballpark followed the other — can better target these ads to you based on your relationship with them and the technology cauldron that forms from your use of “software plus services,” then all the other providers of platforms for online ads will be sunk.
We used to have the division of church and state between media editorial and advertising, but what of the division between technology and advertising? There isn’t one. You may think you own your PC (vendors would differ) but you don’t own the servers that toss up your “software plus services.” You want to play ball? You gotta look at the ads. You gotta see the craplets.
Reminds me of the line from fictional Southie strongman Frank Costello in The Departed: “I don’t want to be a product of my environment, I want my environment to be a product of me.” You, dear readers, will be a product of the environment that your “software plus services” provider wants for you, based on what’s good for their investors.
Even, over the next 3 to 10 years, as the newspaper business thinks it can reinvent its paper-based revenue streams from the Internet, in comes the IT vendors. These “software plus services” providers will — from start-up of the first craplets when you turn the thing on until the last mouse click before you die — have you pegged. They will know what you want before you do. No other entity can better match ads to users than a combined IT platform provider and online services provider whose business is based on advertising revenue. The marketers will finally have the tools they’ve always wanted.
And so those other media company web sites that dish up the highest-quality content, that provide top-line fourth-estate journalism will do okay (we hope), but the largest ad dollars growth will go to those “software plus services” providers that can give the advertisers the best on-target and metrics-based match-up between buyers and sellers. And then the IT companies buy the media companies, and then they buy the telecos and cable and mobile providers. Nice and tidy. On stop shopping to get inside of your head/wallet.
Who to blame? No one. It’s inevitable. Government regulators could scarcely keep up, even if they will and budgets existed. If Google and Microsoft don’t do it someone else will. Mark Cuban thinks those alternatives could well be the local broadband providers, and he’s right … but only for a time. Once the total online ad monopoly kicks in, it will be a digital Standard Oil on steroids with no Sherman Antitrust Act.
Is Google the white knight and Microsoft the evil empire? Nope. Just like in any good vs evil saga (Star Wars?) both sides need each other desperately. For the better that Google does in making ad-based online applications and services work acceptably, the easier it is for Microsoft to inject that model into its current stable of software, and present it as … services.
And the more successful (could they be any more successful?) that Microsoft is at providing PC applications and services locally, online or both, the easier it is for Google to make its SaaS alternatives look good enough. These two massively and globally influential companies will ratchet each other up to the level of the modern-day ballpark. It’s not either-or, it’s both Microsoft and Google propelling the shifts in the market to ad-based everything online, including your business applications, including your high school yearbook.
We are all just going along for the ride. For many of us, we think we get the functional services cheaply because the ads pay for the “software plus services.” But when was the last time you saw the price of admission tickets to a ball game fall as they hoisted yet another billboard up over left field?
It won’t be ad-based revenue or subscription. No, it will be ad-based revenue and subscription. Has to be. We have no choice.
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In effect, he said, SOA is just good EA. The goals for each are ultimately the same: To get better at building agile IT architectures and to make change the number one requirement for IT.
But that’s not what you’ll find on the street. In many cases those planning SOAs are not in synch with those that are keeping the trains running on time, so to speak, inside enterprise datacenters. Linthicum pointed out that there are currently “two worlds out there,” enterprise architects and SOA archirtects, with one working up from the existing IT landscape and the other working down, respectively, from the larger concepts of agility, reuse and orchestration of service points.
“There’s not a lot of synergy, and even some fighting,” said Linthicum. “The EA guys don’t get full implications of SOA, and SOA guys don’t get how SOA meshes with existing enterprise methods and standards.”
Into this Babel, many if not most CEOs think that IT is holding them back. The business leaders want to change automated business processes much more quickly.
So many business leaders are open to SOA. They cotton to the idea of IT easily adapting and becoming agile, they encourage reuse, they want independent change management. The idea is to “orchestrate” rather than integrate, and to “configure” rather than develop said Linthicum.
At the same time, CEOs need for all the parts that are currently running to keep running. Hence the need for deeper understanding and cooperation between the EA crowd and SOA crowd.
So what are the next steps to make EA and SOA act in concert? How can the will of the organization at large be cultivated to support the $7 million to $10 million needed for even a medium-sized business to meaningfully implement SOA?
Linthicum recommends that IT leaders see beyond the SOA hype, to encourage enterprise architects to become advocates for positive change that embraces SOA principles and methods. He also says that SOA must play well with and embrace such mega trends such as SaaS, Web 2.0, application modernization, datacenter consolidation, and semantic data management.
“See the emerging web as a resource,” Linthicum extolled the crowd of some 300 IT leaders and architects. “The lines are blurring between enterprise apps and the web.”
Conceptually IT professionals are on board about SOA … how to get there is the rub, he said. There remain too many “bad practices,” such as selecting technology before knowing SOA needs, not sticking to EA best practices, not creating a strong business case for SOA, using wrong people, and suffering from a lack of influence and political strength in the organization.
“Don’t select technology too early, don’t get caught up in the hype … look to the data issues and semantics first … Keep your vendors working for you. The smarter you are the more successful they can help you be,” said Linthicum.
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