Service Orient or Be Doomed!: How Service Orientation Will Change Your Business

CHAPTER 10

Tackling the Inertia in the Organization

In the 1600s, Sir Isaac Newton distilled the complexity of the laws of physics into three fundamental rules that guided the movement of objects in the world. The first of these laws was the principle of inertia: Any object in motion tends to stay in motion unless acted on by some external force. If Newton wasn't speaking about objects, we might think he was talking about organizations and people, because the same fundamental reality holds true: Every organization will keep doing what it was doing before unless some external force forces it to change. Although this sort of inertia is positive when the business implements optimized processes and good business practices, it can be a significant problem for the company where inefficiency, bad business practices, and political ugliness continue unabated. As we discussed in Chapter 1, it is this bad sort of inertia that has kept the ugly rats' nests of tightly coupled IT around. Using Service Orientation, we must tackle this inertia and shift the momentum of the organization toward good business behaviors and improved IT practices.

SELLING SERVICE ORIENTATION TO YOUR BOSS, TEAM, AND COMPANY

According to a well-known saying, the road to business success is littered with failed companies that had great technology. After all, a good technology or a good product alone is not sufficient to guarantee success in the marketplace. Successful firms also need effective sales and marketing to ...