Next Revolution in Productivity

If your company embraced the reengineering revolution and is now hitting a wall, look beyond business processes to the new frontier of efficiency: the activities that make up those processes. Advances in IT--especially a relatively recent one called service-oriented architecture--are making it possible to design and deploy business activities as Lego-like software components, which can help transform your business into a highly productive plug-and-play operation. SOA enables discrete activities to be accessed via the internet and to be easily updated, shared, bought, and sold--both within your organization and externally. Most companies have thought of SOA merely as an easier, less expensive way to maintain the software that supports existing operations. By failing to revisit their organizational designs before applying SOA, however, these businesses are missing an opportunity to replace proprietary processes and activities with standardized, fungible ones. That's the nuanced argument made by Merrifield, of Microsoft; Calhoun, of Accelare; and Stevens, of Synaptus. To guide you through the intricacies of revisiting your operations, they outline an approach called a business capabilities analysis. Their method involves diagramming your company's work activities, describing the capabilities that support them, valuing and assessing the performance of both, and creating a heat map that helps identify the priorities for an improvement program. The authors share real-world examples of companies that have reaped rewards from this self-analysis and subsequent SOA implementation. They also acknowledge the barriers to applying SOA, including the gulf between CEOs and their IT departments. The leaders who overcome such obstacles, say the authors, will pioneer the next great leap in corporate productivity.