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Agility and Execution – Organizational Success Through Flexible Business Processes
Only a company which is flexible, agile and responsive will be successful. The secret to success is agility, meaning the ability to quickly adapt company processes. Against this backdrop, IT is of particular importance as it is virtually the machine implementing company processes.
A variety of very different routes – much discussed in the IT world – lead to the goal of agility. The most radical of these is what is called extreme programming. The fathers of extreme programming assume that the user is not actually aware of what he really wants. There would be no sense in planning a solution, because the end user would not understand the plan anyway and, even if he did, he would permanently be making changes to it. This is why the ‘eXtreme’ programmers see more sense in working on solutions bit by bit and conferring with the end user in the same piecemeal way. This results in a test-driven, thoroughly experimental approach. However, one must concede that this approach does have agility, and it is this agility that one must try to carry over into other IT concepts. For one thing is clear: agility to IT generally means shortening introduction and adaptation cycles.
The concepts for the so-called Service-oriented Architectures (SOA) are taking the same – and in my opinion right – direction. Here, too, small functional building blocks are employed, which are represented by Services as standardized interfaces.
These can be flexibly assembled to form entire business processes of an organization. A Service-oriented Architecture starts with a company’s processes. As a consequence of service-orientation, new and particularly more flexible ways evolve to carry out the technical implementation of business process requirements in IT. In order to achieve this, business processes must be described formally in order to be understood by the service-oriented IT platforms. |
