July 23, 2007 – 2:23 pm
The excitement surrounding the integration of the enterprise with Web 2.0 is hype-rich and is the corporate world’s long-delayed introduction to systems thinking. While the possibilities for corporate growth are significant, the implications of interconnected and integrated business processes may soon cause businesses to have to rethink their current concept of a business activity.
Understanding Implications
We often present the concepts of initial conditions and conditions at present (CAP) as a means of understanding and managing systems. During one session with technical leads and project managers from various internal development teams we presented the question; “Would development grind to a halt if everyone knew the implications of their changes?”. The question was followed by a nervous laugh. No one could definitively answer the question. They did know that given their experience and the significance of their development efforts, the implications of their changes were well beyond their ability to predict. The nervous laugh really came from the understanding that accurately making those predictions was part of their charge.
For some types of systems, one could potentially know the state of a system in the future if all of the initial conditions are known and the system is free from external influence or random noise. The problem of course is that we never really know all of the initial conditions or escape the reality of external influence and random noise.
An Implication of Integration
Businesses often have the luxury of processing their activities within the confines of their organizational boundaries. There are many external influences but such influences can often be avoided or delayed because the strength of the connection between the business process and the external influence is typically not immediately evident or enforced.
Now lets think about a business that has its processes connected to external processes maintained by service vendors, governments and other applicable entities. These relationships (connections) are now stronger. A change to one can have an immediate impact on another which can thus provide immediate feedback as to the efficacy, legality or feasibility of that change. While this is often considered a net positive it has many implications. One of these implications is greater insight into CAP conditions which in turn allows for better prediction. We all applaud this because of our desire (and charge) to control. But therein lies a problem. Knowing more about the actual (or perceived) implications of a change may mean that many current and planned business processes are found to be unfeasible or have undesirable results. Many businesses succeed because their processes are feasible within certain boundaries. External implications are often ignored or unknown, allowing a business to operate for a period of time without consideration for the impact of its processes. Interconnectedness may cause many businesses to have to face more of the implications of their activities and thus potentially significantly modify their behavior. This will result in costly changes for business, regulatory ambiguity and many new opportunities.
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