Managing disruption

Let me take you back to a dinner conversation from roughly five months ago. InfoWorld had just finished day two of our SOA Executive Forum in New York, and the editors were dining with a subset of the InfoWorld CTO Advisory Council. We routinely rely on the council — dyed-in-the-wool technologists with a keen sense of what’s happening in the IT trenches — for guidance, ideas, and constructive criticism.

In this case, we were looking for input on the event — what had worked, what hadn’t, and what were we missing? The comments were primarily complimentary, but a few council members suggested that our technology focus had obscured an important reality: SOA is a powerful, highly disruptive force, they told us. Where were the sessions on how to manage the organizational changes that SOA precipitates? Why hadn’t we addressed structural, communications, and retraining issues?

We promptly revised our program for the March 2006 SOA Forum. And then we assigned Contributing Editor Dan Tynan to write about how successful IT departments manage change in the wake of big SOA projects. That pursuit ultimately led to this week’s cover story.

Although we had instructed Tynan to examine change through the lens of SOA, he quickly expanded his field of inquiry. “For IT departments today, managing disruption is just part of the job — whether you’re phasing out legacy apps, outsourcing basic tech services, or reducing redundancies after a merger. It involves a lot more than just dealing with SOA,” he says.

Interestingly, Tynan also encountered a real reluctance on the part of IT pros to discuss how their SOA initiatives affected the organization. “I’m normally pretty good at getting people to talk to me, but not when it came to SOA,” says the veteran tech journalist. “They just clammed up on me. I think it’s because SOA has the potential to so radically change the way they do business that they’re afraid of giving away their secret sauce.”

Maybe next time, we’ll just have Tynan have dinner with our Advisory Council. And we won’t serve clams.

On another note, I’d like to congratulate InfoWorld Lead Analyst and Blogger in Chief Jon Udell, who was just named one of the “Folio: 40” for his “daily Weblog powerhouse,” described as “a weekly must-read for [IT] industry execs.” Folio is the publication of record for the magazine industry, and its annual Folio: 40 awards are much coveted. Udell appears in the “Under the Radar” category, for “People who you may not have heard of but whose efforts and accomplishments deserve recognition.” That gave most of us here a chuckle, given Jon’s reputation among the IT set. But if this award introduces even more folks to his ideas, I’m all for it.