Anurag Jain's Blog on Bangalore Events, Travel, IIM Bangalore, IIM, IIMB, Management

Tuesday, February 22, 2005

Posted 8:28 AM by Anurag

X-Files: Radical Incrementalism & SOA

Culled this out from my communication in a yahoogroup sometime back.

Message: From: JH Subject: Radical Incrementalism in IT Industry(John Seely Brown's Views)

Hello, I had gone through the writings of John Seely Brown, the former head of Xerox Palo Alto Research Centre and Chief scientists of Xerox . In the current context, many IT companies are facing IT architecture as a barrier during short term strategic move. IT architecture is the overall structure of and interrelations among data, business logic, interfaces of firms computer, other hardware, applications,databases, operating systems and networks. Radical incrementalism emphasizes short-term i.e six to twelve months of operational and organizational initiatives . This new concept helped companies like Microsoft, Dell, Charles Schwab and Wall-mart stores which delivers return to sharholders. But it is an Herculean task to accomplish radical incrementalism. Operational shortcomings and organizational inertia are the barriers in short term innovation in business practices and processes . Current IT architecture needs customized connections to query or communicate data which are application specific. If a third party is involved between clients and vender, the problems become more complicated. So creating new kind of connection to co-ordinate among databases, OS, application and human being is service oriented architecture which is a new innovation. In stead of customized connections, even incompatible operating systems on different vocabularies can be joined, assembled and disassembled early. That means, all participants (clients, vender,customers) have agreed on a standardized vocabulary to serve as a common daclaration overlay. Detail report is provided at www.mckinseyquartely.com .

regards

JH

Message: From: Anurag Jain Subject: RE: Radical Incrementalism in IT Industry(John Seely Brown's Views)

John Seely is a vetreran and visionary in IS area. The topic he's talkin about is highly relevant, especially for organizations that are opearting in a high-velocity environment, and for those organizations that are led by IT-driven transformation. The issue of how such orgs. deal with rapid change in technological context and how they align their business processes with the new technological forces so as to be able to avoid a discontinuity in their service/product offerings to customers, is highly contemporary, espically when orgs. grow huge in size. Also, as you said, planning horizons are becoming shorter, and technology choice-basket bigger and bigger.

In my opinion, strategic planning is dead. Its only emergent strategy that is useful today because of higher external environment turbulence than ever before. IS departments too have been grappling with the problem. Well, the answer seems to be SOA (Service Oriented Architecture). There's been some talk about SOAs for some time now. Web-services seem to be enabling the SOA implementation.

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