Outside Innovation

It’s SOA Time: Do You Know What Services Your Customers Need?

Service-Oriented Architecture is finally coming of age. Those of you who are designing or refining your SOA strategies shouldn’t ignore many of our early reports on this topic. Many of the best “how to’s” and conceptual overviews were written by Brenda Michelson. Brenda is now the Principal, Business Technologist, of Elemental Links. You can check out her blog and Web site for an update on her activities. Now, thanks to Brenda’s evangelism and that of many other enterprise architects, SOA is finally becoming a best practice in IT enterprise architecture to support the design of adaptive applications and infrastructure.

However, if you want your organization to have a CUSTOMER-adaptive architecture, you’ll want to take an “OUTSIDE INnovation” approach to designing your Services-Oriented Architecture. The good news is that Brenda and I collaborated a number of years ago (2005!) on developing such a methodology. We used customer co-design techniques with our proven Customer Scenario® Mapping interactive design tools to capture customers’ “Ideal State” scenario designs. Then we identified the customer-critical services and used Brenda’s service classification scheme to help the technology architects on the co-design team correctly identify and describe these customer-critical services.

Brenda and I were a bit ahead of our time back in 2005. We think that many folks may finally be ready to take advantage of this streamlined and powerful technique. So this week, I’m re-offering her seminal report, entitled Service Discovery Using Customer Scenario Mapping.

Enterprise Mash Ups and SOA

As I plunged back into the world of Web 2.0, mash ups, and gadgets, I noticed that there's now a huge buzz around "enterprise mash ups" and a convergence between the worlds of Service-Oriented Architectures and Ajax/Executable Web/Mash Up promulgators. This epiphany has been too long in coming. The handwriting has been on the wall for a while. And pioneering lead users have been combining Web Services with end-user-friendly gadgets, using RSS and event-based syndication (publish and subscribe) for several years.

As usual, the hype around Enterprise Mash Ups will no doubt be extreme. It's already being pushed as the next nirvana for the IT-run around crowd. Use Web-based tools to snap together services. Leverage all the great utility services that are already out there (Google Maps, Amazon S3, Eventful, Flickr, YouTube... pick your favorite platforms and tools). You don't have to wait for your IT department to wrap your back-end application functionality into real Web Services, you can "cheat" by extracting data in the form of reports and turning them into RSS feeds, which you can mash up with graphical user interfaces and tools. This is the general spin. And there are now dozens of "roll your own" enterprise mash up platforms and toolkits springing up to absorb Venture Capital dollars and vie for our attention.

This convergence is a good thing. It's way overdue. It will be overhyped. But there are ways to take advantage of this trend without going off the deep end. I look forward to helping you chart your path!

THE WEB 2.0 WAVE--WHY IT’S NOT A FAD

This week, I attended the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco. It was a great conference--meaty sessions, thousands of smart people, great logistics--all the things that matter were well-orchestrated and unobtrusive. I continue to be impressed by the O’Reilly organization and its many partners (in this case, CMP). “Spreading the Knowledge of Innovators” is the O’Reilly motto. If you want to know where lead customers are taking us--this is the place to be.

The Web 2.0 Culture: Loosely-Coupled Innovation

The Web 2.0 Culture isn’t a youth culture. There weren’t a lot of kids at this conference (although admission to the keynotes and exhibits was free or $100). In fact, most of the Web 2.0 Expo attendees have kids. The 10,000 participants ranged in age from mid-20s through 60-somethings, definitely skewed towards 30-somethings. There were seriously optimistic business/technology strategists (like me), corporate IT renegades, seasoned architects, professional developers, marketing and design professionals, lots of entrepreneurs--some on their second and third ventures--and venture capitalists, as well as plenty of professional bloggers and reporters.

The mood was optimistic. There are no evil empires that can stop innovation. Anything is possible. It’s a culture of DIY, roll your own, solve your own problems, invent a new toolset, secure in the knowledge that:

• Whatever you invent will plug into and interoperate with everyone else’s innovations
• The simplest approaches are the most elegant and valuable
• It doesn’t really matter if someone else has done something similar before
• Esthetics count--clean, crisp graphical UIs are in

WHAT’S BEYOND WEB 2.0 AND ENTERPRISE 2.0? BIZ 3.0!

Align Your Business Strategy Around Your Customers’ Processes And Outcomes

Before you build upon the principles of Web 2.0 to craft an Enterprise 2.0 strategy for your firm, take a moment to reflect on what’s coming next. Remember that Consumer Web 2. isn’t really about technology enablement. It’s about consumer participation. Enterprise 2.0 isn’t really about supporting rich user interfaces, blogging, tagging, RSS feeds, and social networks for your employees. Enterprise 2.0 is about customer and employee empowerment. Tim O'Reilly refers to this as "the architecture of participation" in his compact definition of Web 2.0.

What are the Benefits from Web and Enterprise 2.0?

The bottom line benefits of both Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 accrue when you empower your consumer and/or business customers to participate in shaping their online experiences with your company and with one another. Empowered customers are more engaged and more loyal. They cost less to serve and they contribute value by adding their own “spin” to your Web sites, your products, and to your brand experience.  Your firm profits from the network effects that result as customers interact electronically around your products and your business. Web 2.0-enabled customers become designers, contributors, consultants, guides, and promoters to other prospects and customers.

Software Companies Are Redesigning Themselves around the “Software as Services” Model

This services-oriented approach is more than a repackaging of software. It's also having a profound impact on the organizational structure of companies. Software companies, in particular, are beginning to shift their organizational structures to accommodate the growing importance of services. This new organizational model has the ability to be much more customer adaptive. It's a good example of Outside Innovation organizational design.

The Link between Customer Experience and Service-Oriented Architecture

We're the first, and maybe still the only, analyst/consulting firm that has made a strong connection between customer experience and SOA. Since 1994, we've been writing and consulting about "making it easy for customers to do business with you," and since 1989, we've been writing and consulting about distributed objects, networked computing, and their evolution into the SOA model. We were the first to jump on the Web Services band wagon. Our Quality of Customer Experience^SM methodology and our Customer Scenario® Mapping tool have included services discovery and definition since its inception 15 years ago.