The Downside of Disruptive

Lots of ink has been spilled about the risks & opportunities of disruptive innovation, but much of the analysis has been more techno-centric than full-spectrum (e.g., People, Organization, Process, and Technology). This was one of the criticisms leveled at Christensen's initial writing on disruptive innovation that he addressed in subsequent discussions (e.g., "The Innovator's Solution").

Joe McKendrick discusses one slice of this vis-a-vis SOA in this post. The opportunity (and the challenge) of SOA is that it enables (and requires) what I've called "full-stack innovation" (i.e., People, Organization, Process, and Technology) to generate disruptive innovation and the associated ROI.

If you just do the Technology, you've spent a lot to do the same thing you're currently doing. While you may theoretically now have a business foundation that supports more agile and innovative capabilities, you haven't begun to address the hard stuff (e.g., People & Organization).

On the other hand, if you tackle the full stack, you have to constrain your efforts to narrow threads since full-stack efforts inherently create a lot of internal non-technical disruption.

I've not seen anyone with a good story on how to handle the business tension between low-disruption low-ROI infrastructure-centric SOA and high-disruption high-ROI business-thread-centric full-stack SOA. This seems especially difficult in light of what Joe discusses...that there tends to be a significant disconnect between the IT and business views of technology and its potential.