Enterprise SOA

What happens when core eventually becomes context?

The reality is that what's core today will not always be core tomorrow. Remember, we're not talking about core competencies here. In this setting, core—a business process, a product, some secret IT advantage, whatever—is anything that differentiates you from your competitors. Over time, core naturally becomes context. An innovation slowly degrades into a best practice, and then into a commodity. What do you do with a core-turned-context process? Moore's answer was simple: outsource it. Find someone who considers that process their core, and if there isn't anyone, then spin out the people responsible for maintaining that process. Let it become their core; put them in charge of innovating it, but whatever you do, get it out of the business if possible.

That might be a little extreme, but Moore has the right idea. When core becomes context, it's critical to divert resources away from that activity as soon as possible in order to give oxygen to a nascent innovation that could become core itself. The IT mechanism for doing so is consolidation, the selective culling and repurposing of software and hardware formerly dedicated to core processes that become redundant as they become context and as those resources become needed elsewhere.

At least that's how it should work in theory. In reality, the static nature of today's monolithic architectures impedes consolidation in much the same way it impedes innovation. Faced with a heterogeneous collection ...