The Upside of Disruptive

According to a new article in the current HBR, IT enables process agility that provides significant (albeit potentially fleeting) competitive advantage ("Investing in IT That Makes a Competitive Difference", co-authored by Andrew McAfee who has a blog entry linking to a free (until late July 2008) copy of the article).

Quibbles aside (e.g., does the emergence of China and India as major players on the IT stage contribute to some of the discussed effects? (vs. generic globalization, which is dismissed as a factor)), the case made seems plausible given the potential disruptive effects of an emerging hyperconnectivity and the relentless march of Moore's Law.

It raises interesting (unanswered) questions about why some organizations are evidently very effective at (a) identifying local innovations that can easily be replicated across the enterprise, and (b) deploying and governing those changes. Nor does it address the potential risk of deploying innovations that are much less relevant to the enterprise than they are to a specific local context (part of the governance challenge).

It strongly endorses an approach to SOA that would (a) deploy a common infrastructure across the enterprise, and (b) encourage a bottom-up thread-based application of SOA to business needs. And, it clearly recognizes that this approach introduces some significant governance challenges/opportunities.

However, it also makes it clear that the primary competitive advantage comes in the Execution domain, not in the Exploration domain (except where Exploration is looking for greater efficiency/effectiveness in Execution-oriented processes). The good news is that there appears to be plenty of room for just that kind of innovation. The challenge of catalyzing IT-enabled innovation in areas other than Process remains.

Finally, the case for Web/Enterprise 2.0 seems much more anecdotal...perhaps in another 10 years we'll have enough data to make a clear case in that area.

All of which makes me wonder...if we're seeing this kind of immediate effect from Process improvements, what will emerge once this type of improvement approach spreads to the People and Organization layers of the stack?