Preface
Agility requires a fundamental change in IT, and that change is on its way.
—Jason Bloomberg and Ronald Schmelzer, Service Orient or Be Doomed!
Remember the dot-com days; what we now call Web 1.0? It was a wild time: Companies with no clue how to make money commanding outrageous valuations, stock prices in the stratosphere, recruiters looking for anyone—anyone!—who had half a clue about the Internet, and lest we forget, the hubris of the New Economy. The Internet changes everything, even the laws of economics! Change happening so fast we can hardly keep up!
You ain't seen nothin' yet.
In retrospect, of course, the whole mess was merely a speculative bubble, another example of selling tulip bulbs for more than houses. And while we may argue that today's tech-driven frenzy—Facebook! Groupon! Pinterest!—may itself be a bubble ready to burst, there's something more fundamental going on.
Something truly revolutionary.
The pace of change is once again accelerating, only now the context for such change is multifaceted and far more complex than the simpler, one-dimensional dot-com days. In fact, so much change surrounds us that we often lose sight of it altogether. It becomes the background noise of our lives.
Such is the nature of true revolutions. It's hard to tell you're in one until after it's done—often many years afterward. But the evidence of revolution is all around us, if we only have the insight to identify individual trends and tie them together into a single story ...
