Summary
The traditional governance and management means of running a business — the levers, pulleys, cables, and brute muscle — will through SOA become more automated, rules- and event-driven, self-service, preprogrammed, policy-orchestrated … agile.
Analysis
Follow service oriented architecture (SOA) to its logical conclusions and you recognize that modern corporations will soon be operated on the equivalent of aviation's "fly by wire."
Instead of directing a business on how to function from the boardroom megaphone, with explanations and edicts, countless meetings, and then reviews and crass incentives, there may soon be policy-driven decisions on how to execute made on a more federated basis — collaborative and productive by making IT not just the means of operating the computer applications, but making IT the means through which to operate the very business itself.
Sound farfetched? Consider that whomever controls the full-fledged SOA to a large extent controls the company. So how should that control actually work? Will companies take a lesson from world history on how to run the business and allow for federated and balanced power? Or will mismatched control over business elements, exacerbated by IT that can not reflect the will or wills of the controlling factors, drag productivity and the company down? To fail at SOA is to fail at modern business?
