SOA and Emergent IT

Back in January I went to the FASTForward Conference in San Diego. One of the keynote speakers, Andrew McAfee of Harvard Business School, spoke about Enterprise 2.0 and how it will transform business in the next decade or two. One of the things that stuck in my head after the conference was how emergent systems will drive value by allowing users to build structure themselves rather than imposing structure on them.

As I have thought about that concept over the last few months, what has occurred to me is that we have a similar opportunity in the enterprise architecture space, using technologies like SOA, to design systems that are self-organizing. Take, for example, setting up an employee directory service rather than just posting the directory on the corporate intranet as an application silo. Once the directory service is posted, capable users from all over the business are able to read from the service, and could provide novel and interesting uses of the data. HR issues aside, I believe the effect of providing major functionality as a service will provide tremendous value for businesses over time. I see this trend as a long-term shift toward emergent architecture in the enterprise.