Business Transformation in Action

But it's now a question of what things will look like as we emerge from the other side of the downturn. Every downturn has shaken up the old order and created new patterns. The PC revolution emerged from the recession of 1980-1982; the Internet revolution from the recession of 1990-1991; and SOA and social media arose from the 2000-2002 post-dot-bomb, post-Y2K mess.

Here's the key fact everyone forgets: in 1982 -- while business commentators were predicting the end of the world and years of non-growth -- no one foresaw the PC revolution that energized the 1980s, and created an entire new industry (led by companies such as Microsoft and Oracle). In fact, futurists at the time were predicting IT would force female workers into "pink-collar ghettos" with endless mundane data-entry work.

In 1992 -- while business commentators were predicting the end of the world and years of non-growth -- no one foresaw the Web revolution that created the huge dot-com bubble of the 1990s. Sure, it eventually popped, but in the meantime, the IT economy has energized and enriched to heights no one could have imagined in the early 1990s.

In 2002 -- you guessed it -- they predicted endless doom and gloom, as usual. But the decade was marked by the rise of service orientation, Google, social media, business intelligence, and many other things.

I just saw an announcement from one IT company that they're now seeing an uptick in software upgrades, which are a leading economic indicator for a coming economic recovery. That's a good sign right there. But what is the long-term game plan for this next round of upgrades? Does anyone have a clear picture yet?

Times of turmoil always equate to times of new opportunity. The rough-and-tumble economy is really a time for SOA -- and information technology in general -- to shine, to prove their mettle.

IT is a great, upbeat, entrepreneurial, intellectually challenging, and future-oriented industry, and the place to be.

SOA was forged as a response to the IT industry recession of 2001-2002. We knew we had to find ways to deploy technology more efficiently, and with more value to the business. There was even a growing recognition that for many organizations, IT was now the business.

Why and how can information technology make a difference and pull us out of the economic muck? Very simply, it's about productivity. The reason we've done so well in past decades with a rising standard of living and falling relative prices is because of our rising productivity -- the ability to do incredibly more with incredibly less. Automation, information technology, and service orientation make us enormously competitive. We need to keep on pushing the limits of productivity.

Harvard's Andrew McAfee, who studied the impact of information technology on business growth on industries over a 10-year timeframe, has documented there is a strong correlation between IT investment and growth.

And back to SOA...  it's great to see IBM is pressing the message that SOA is good for business, and SOA will play a role in driving business forward through the current turmoil and into the coming economic recovery. And in the process, businesses will be well positioned to grow and surpass their competitors.

This is a message that IBM VP Sandy Carter conveyed at the IBM Virtual Global SOA Forum, "Work Smarter, Take Out Costs In a Tough Economy." It's an opportunity to thrive, not just survive, she says. (Transcript of Sandy's speech available here.)  RedMonk's James Governor also reflected this bullishness on SOA, and speculated that if financial institutions were more service-oriented with their business technology, they might have seen less of the mortgage mess.

I like Sandy's analogy of the cheetah -- the fastest animal on the planet -- that is now on the endangered species list, yet the simple little chipmunk thrives. Why is this so? Because the chipmunk is incredibly adaptable and agile, while the cheetah isn't. Businesses need to achieve much greater adaptability, she says.

SOA is part of what Sandy referred to a "smarter planet" -- in which people, businesses and events are now interconnected by trillions of components and devices. "Service orientation really is the key to agility and cost optimization," she relates. "By extracting services from your applications, putting those business services in a reusable format, it allows you to quickly change, based on what's happening in the environment, or to invoke change yourself on the industry. It allows you to flexibly connect information, because you isolate the business logic from the underpinning IT. and  then you can reuse. Not just the IT assets, but the business assets as well. This allows you to unlock the power. Of your business resources, as well as your IT resources. And provide agility and cost optimization."

Ubiquitous services, everywhere and anywhere you need them. That may be the foundation of The Next Big Thing that will shape the boom economy of the 2010s. Anybody care to venture a prediction of the shape of things to come?