Jiri’s Notepad

Considering how much space is filled with techno speak, I was little surprised when I’ve recently heard quite a few people talking about SOA being much more interesting from a business perspective.

The following post by Irving Wladawsky-Berger points in the same direction:

Technology innovations are the easiest to appreciate. Computing is becoming embedded into the physical world all around us, from entertainment devices, to RFID tags, to automobiles, all made possible by the constantly increasing power and affordability of IT. Advances in supercomputing are bringing tremendous promise to Health Care and Life Sciences. When you add the Internet, WWW, Grids and other major open standards initiatives to the mix, what you get is a truly pervasive information infrastructure and the processing power and storage to make it valuable.

These advances in technology and open standards are making it possible to integrate IT much deeper into individual business processes, as well as enabling the integration of those processes into sophisticated business solutions. While still in the very early stages, I am convinced that we are at the threshold of a business process revolution that promises to restructure businesses, industries, perhaps even economies over time.

The key phrase here is “over time.” As often happens, our technologies are way ahead of our ability to apply them. For such a business process revolution to become a reality, we need major advances in how such processes are designed, built, deployed and supported. In particular, we need to evolve from today’s rather labor-intensive and one-of-a-kind approaches to the use of sophisticated tools, disciplined methodologies and standard business components. This will require significant innovation in both the worlds of IT and business.