Steve Jones wrote:
<snip>
If SOA is just technology then it is of value only to technologist.
- 1. Technology brings value to anybody who chooses to use it, not just
technologist. Let me quote wikipedia: "Technology has affected society and
its surroundings in a number of ways"
At which point it ceases to become "just" a technology and starts to
become the _application_ of technology.
A rock is just a rock until someone realised you could hit stuff with
it, then it became a tool. If SOA is simply about the internals of IT
then it is simply a rock, if it enables the business to better use IT
then it becomes a powerful tool.
Steve
There's two issues here:
1) What is the boundary of IT? When does IT stop and business begin?
Its a very very blurred boundary, but there are bits that are pure IT
(e.g. internal delivery, programming languages, integration
technology, etc)
2) Is it possible for the "internals" of IT to affect the business or even
change the business?
Without the business using them? No. With the business applying them yes.
I don't have a clear cut answer to the first question which makes it hard to
answer the second question, but I will try to illustrate the point of the
second question anyway:
Let's think about a connection to internet for a minute. The medium,
protocol and bandwith used is purely technical things, but it still affects
our behaviour and the business models of Internet providers.
When I had a internet connection with a bandwith of 9.6 kb/s I used it
mainly for browsing purely text based pages. Today, when I have a internet
connection with a speed of several Mb/s, I'm happy to read the newspaper on
internet or even watch a video. The computer is always connected to internet
with gives loads of new oppertunities compared to my old dial-up modem. Was
it an internal change to the IT-system? I would say so. Only the protocol
and the bandwith changed. The internal change of the IT-system changed my
behaviour in several ways and the Internet providers found new business
models enabled by the technology.
Which I agree, a technology _applied to your business problem_ (which
happens to be in IT for yourself) can certainly change the way we work
and offer us new opportunities to work in new ways. If however the
technology was PURELY internal (i.e. you were still on 9.6kbps but the
servers were running at 100Gbps) then you'd not be seeing the benefits
in being able to change your business but might see a slight
improvement in the IT characteristics of the systems.
We obviously don't define the system boundary in the same way. The
System, from my point of view, is my computer, the connection to the ISP
and the servers on the Internet. With that definition, the change is a
purely internal technology change.
The next big change was when I got a 3G connection to my laptop. Did it
change my behaviour? Absolutely! Now I have the possibility to take some
fridays off and take my family to the summer house, where I'm able to work
from a distance. Was it an internal change to the IT-system? I would say so.
Only the medium for transfering the data changed but it made a profound
change to my behavior and the business models used by Internet providers.
I'd disagree that this was an internal change, specifically because
the 3G card is something that is placed into your hands and then YOU
choose to use it, i.e. this is an externalised technology. If 3G
cards were about but you didn't know about them or didn't have access
to them as they were reserved for IT internals then it would deliver
you no benefits.
Ok, it's possible to intrepret this example in different ways. Let me
give you a better, and less ambigous, and more current example of an
internal technology change that affects both the users and the business:
Google reports that the loose 20% of the web traffic for every half
second of delay when rendering a web page. Amazon reports that they
loose 1% of their revenues for every 100 ms of delay. Steve Souders,
Google, asserts that the biggest time thief is the use of Javascript.
With the new generation of browsers, IE 8, Firefox 3.5 and Chrome 2, it
is possible to run JavaScript while the pages are downloaded and loaded.
By exploiting this possiblity, which mainly is about the design of the
javascript code, it will be possible to render the web pages much
faster. Google reports a 60% increase in the speed of rendering a page
with this new way of designing and using JavaScript.
Do you think this internal technology optimization will be import for
the business? Will it be important for the users? I bet it will!
That is my point about SOA being inwardly focusing. Its like having
3G cards but not giving them to the travelling salesmen.
Steve
Actually, I'm not discussing SOA in this thread. I'm arguing about your
statement where you wrote: "If X is just technology then it is of value
only to technologist". You actually wrote "SOA" instead of "X", but I
guess you meant this in general terms, No?
In either case, I think that is just plain wrong, which I hope my latest
exemple has illustrated.
// Dennis Djenfer
