Business-ification of IT

Fresh from InfoWorld‘s SOA Executive Forum in New York, I’d like to share some observations from two days of very intense discussions at the sizzling intersection between business and technology.

First, SOA is fast becoming vital to the enterprise not just because it gives insight into the right way to approach IT — platform independence, reusable code, and so on — but because it furthers the ongoing “business-ification” of IT.

What do I mean? Dial the clock back 25 years, and IT — then probably MIS — was a classic service department. Those in the front office needed certain basic functions such as invoicing, inventory control, and record keeping. In the back, the tech crew built systems to meet those needs.

For most companies today, IT doesn’t just serve the business, IT is the business — and I’m not just talking about eBay and Amazon. From giant shipping companies to financial institutions to military and governmental agencies, IT is the nervous system that permits the organism to function. SOA permits the rapid realignment of that nervous system to suit the organism’s needs without limiting its ability to change again tomorrow as the economy and competitive environment evolve. Today, that means the difference between prosperity and Chapter 11.

Second, the most intractable obstacles to SOA tend to be human, not technical. Note that I said “intractable,” not “difficult.” The technical obstacles are plenty difficult — breaking enterprise functions into logically derived “services,” abstracting communication and security protocols, and so forth. But technical problems tend to be solvable, whereas human problems — who owns the data, who foots the bill — may prove insurmountable. (But woe to the company that fails to solve them!)

Third, don’t try SOA at home. The field is evolving rapidly, and those who’ve implemented SOA successfully have usually had lots of advice from experienced peers, consultants, and/or vendors. In fact, when InfoWorld surveyed companies considering or implementing SOA, prior experience turned out to be the No. 1 most sought-after quality in a partner, ahead of other important factors such as reputation, resources, and a proven methodology.

Finally, the leaders of the SOA revolution will be neither businesspeople with a superficial knowledge of IT nor technologists who have a passing acquaintance with business. They will be people who understand both aspects deeply, regardless of where their training or principal responsibility lie.

This comes back to the point about IT being the business, not just serving the business. It’s why InfoWorld organized the IT Executive Forum, along with sponsors such as BEA Systems, Computer Sciences Corp. (CSC), Dante Consulting, Hewlett-Packard, Plumtree, SOA Software, and Sonic Software: to bring together the best minds and push the field forward. And it’s why we’ll be announcing more exciting SOA initiatives soon, so please stay tuned.