<<So often discussions about SOA return to the subject of how to
communicate the SOA message to business, convince them to invest and
to have faith in the opportunities that SOA can generate. In these
discussions, the CIO is often held up as both the potential champion
and the potential bogeyman. A bogeyman in the sense that they are
sometimes considered to be the blockers to innovation. SOA proponents
sometimes mutter what some Web2.0 proponents shout from the rooftops.
As Chris Anderson, inventor of the Web2.0 "Long Tail" concept put it
recently:
"CIOs, it turns out, are mostly business people who have been
given the thankless job of keeping the lights on, IT wise. And the
best way to ensure that they stay on is to change as little as possible."
Chris is right in pointing out that there is an underlying problem
with enterprise IT and innovation. However, I think it is simplistic
to point the finger at CIOs and their perceived defence of the status
quo. Rather I believe Christopher Koch is much closer the mark in his
excellent piece titled "Oh right, we forgot that CIOs are
unimaginative as well as being fat, lazy and reflexive" (I couldn't
resist repeating the title).
"The predominant view, even in companies that claim IT to be
"strategic," is that the business owns innovation, not IT"
To put it another way: We may be able to reel off the IT successes
that transformed the business from Walmart's supply chain management
to Fedex packaging tracking. However, these are exceptions rather
than the rule. In many if not most cases, business managers simply do
not believe that IT can be an engine of significant change and do not
expect or even want IT to innovate. Partly, this is a cultural legacy
with organisations not realising the degree to which their business is
IT driven. It is also partly a cultural legacy of IT departments,
only too willing to stay in their comfort zone. As Christopher puts it:
It's time for CEOs and business management to acknowledge that
just as their businesses are now completely reliant upon IT, they are
more reliant on the geeks to help them innovate. And the geeks need to
worry less about development languages and start worrying more about
the business.
Obviously, it is also due to the technology legacy we are all familiar
with which makes change hard and running to stand still enough of a
challenge for many. To quote from Christopher again:
"As long as we persist in the naïve assumption that CIOs should be
able to use 10-20 percent of their budgets to create a constant stream
of breakthrough innovation on top of a creaky infrastructure that
consumes nearly all of their management time and staff's attention, we
will not have significant progress."
Is it all too bleak? Business regards IT as plumbers and IT is
spending all of its time and resource patching leaky pipes. Of
course, this situation is precisely that which leads to the
enthusiastic acceptance of the SOA concept by enterprise IT: IT
embracing the need to align with business and SOA providing the
groundwork for a more agile environment and hence potentially
facilitating a steady stream of small and well-targeted innovation.
To quote Christopher, a final time:
"These small innovations add up, but more importantly, they can
change more quickly, giving CIOs something they've never known with
traditional applications and infrastructures: a measure of agility."
This is precisely what we begin to see in organisations successfully
moving along the SOA adoption path: CIOs, who have gained sufficient
agility, can begin to play a role in driving innovation and a role in
business strategy. However, this may take a long time in many
organisations as it requires both delivery on the promise of SOA and a
revolution in the perception of IT by business managers. And we must
accept that during the process, there is no point pointing figures at
the champion or other people who "don't get it".>>
You can read this @:
http://blog.lustratusresearch.com/litebytes/2007/04/soa_slowly_brea.html
Gervas
