Enterprise SOA

What kind of innovation should companies pursue, and how will ESA help them?

It all goes back to speed again and to the beginning of this chapter, actually. Earlier, we mentioned how the time to transparency that encompassed everything from taking a customer's order to passing it up the supply chain to generating a P&L statement had plunged into the subseconds. That was the result of relentless innovation in process execution, a literal race to see who could extract a competitive advantage from the speed of their operations.

However, the final distance between the winner, the runner-up, and the pack wasn't great enough. Light-speed process execution is a best practice well on its way to becoming a commodity. What's next?

The first thought was product innovation; cell phone makers would race to push more models out the door instead of just racing to sell them efficiently. But that didn't happen. For one thing, it wasn't applicable across all industries (it's hard to innovate on something like cement), and in industries with very high rates of product turnover, such as cell phones and consumer electronics, the components are already so commoditized.

So, the last curve left on the graph that appears in Figure 2-1 at the beginning of this chapter is time to change. Can you accelerate and perfect the creation of business process innovations themselves? Call it process innovation . Master practitioners of that art already exist in the world. Dell is the consummate process innovator. Dell ...