Industry Commentary

"When change within your organization is slower than that without, you're in real trouble. We can't predict the future, but we can learn to react a lot faster than our adversaries." - Jack Welch

If we try to build software solutions for highly paid knowledge workers who work in a rapidly changing environment in the same way that we build solutions for back office workers who work in predictable circumstances, we are doomed to failure. Freezing specifications, building software to fit those specs, and ignoring that business is constantly changing is a sure recipe for disaster.

To achieve the levels of functionality, flexibility, and time-to-market required by business today, a radical shift is required in the way in which software is developed. This major shift is already well underway, with Web services and SOAs. But the technology alone will not make any serious impact on the speed and effectiveness with which we are able to build information systems. We need a completely fresh approach to our methodology.

A New Approach
Historically, information has been delivered to desktops in much the same fashion as railroads were built in the early 1900s. Building a railroad system required multiple stages of planning, agreed-upon destinations, predetermined stops at train stations, limited switching choices, the moving of businesses closer to the stations, and rigid schedules to maximize rail efficiency rather than user demand. The very nature of the railroad system leaves little room for flexibility and adaptability. This characteristic is critically important for railroads - and certain types of business applications such as accounting and manufacturing.

But this approach, with its fixed plans, fixed rails, stations, and pre-determined schedules, doesn't work when events cannot be easily anticipated and responses need to be made up on-the-fly. To continue the transportation metaphor, the need for a dynamic business environment is more closely reflected in the process that taxi cab companies use to respond to demand. In a typical U.S. city, cabs cruise the streets with only flexible strategies, allowing response to demand to unfold as required. Decisions are made as closely as possible to the time when action must be taken. The driver makes decisions on the spot - consistent with passengers needs.

In the railroad "methodology," the organization plans in advance and passengers must adjust their plans accordingly. In the taxicab approach, the organization must adjust in real time to the passenger whose plans are unknown most of the time. This requires organizations to embrace uncertainty, dynamic demand, and some degree of chaos, and to learn to thrive on it.

When users are no longer constrained by the shackles of inflexible information systems and are instead empowered by them to act as independent agents pursuing their own solutions with minimal central control, new, highly competitive, and formidable business enterprises can emerge.

Why Now?
Technology and global political, economic, and social trends are intersecting, making this new approach both necessary and possible.

• The speed of change has made existing modes of building software obsolete. In an era when change arrives without warning and threatens to eradicate entire companies and industries overnight, organizations can survive only by engaging the eyes, ears, minds, and emotions of all individuals, providing them with tools and encouraging them to act on intellectual capital and initiative.
• For the first time ever, the software industry has a usable, universally agreed upon, open standard for creating and assembling building blocks of functionality in the form of Web services. The standards and wide support for Web services make possible a significant change in the way software is developed, deployed, and maintained.
• Users are becoming more and more IT savvy and can take on more responsibility for managing their own "personal information services" in ways similar to their ability to build their own spreadsheets, desktop databases, queries, reports, etc.

The Tipping Point
We are reaching the "tipping point" for this approach. The focus of IT is still on delivering solutions by the old railroad model, but this will change - soon. The new approach will make users responsible for automating their own jobs in ways that make sense to them; they will be able to "package" their expertise and make it available as a service over the Web; and they will be able to synchronize these services with other services to achieve larger, more complex business objectives.

Sources

Rubenstein, Moshe; and Firstenberg, Iris. (1999). The Minding Organization: Bring the future to the present and turn creative ideas into business solutions. John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

Sapir, Jonathan. (2004). Igniting the Phoenix: A new vision for IT. Xlibris.