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New Strategies for Business Survival and Success

veryard projects > news > newsletter Oct 1999

Newsletter October 1999

Perhaps like many of you, I have watched the rise of the new breed of Internet entrepreneur with a combination of envy and amazement. It is evidently possible to make large amounts of money at an astonishing speed, by following business practices that appear downright perverse. (It is of course also possible to lose money - for every Netscape or E-Bay, there must be goodness knows how many failures.) Among other things, it seems you can become extremely rich by giving everything away. (I have always been attracted to paradoxes, but this one in particular gives me very warm feelings.)

In today's perverse economy, there are many new and counter-intuitive strategies for business survival and success. A good collection (presented in an informal and highly readable way) can be found in Kevin Kelly's latest book: New Rules for the New Economy.

I see several implications of this situation for those of us who are concerned to maintain an alignment between business and IT.

Firstly, the strategies that have already been defined create opportunities for all organizations to enhance their prospects for survival and success. Some of these strategies may be formally documented as business patterns, and this in turn creates an opportunity for software vendors to build and sell software components designed to help implement these business patterns. There are almost certainly lots more such strategies waiting to be discovered.

Secondly, it means that we need new ways of analysing business strategies and opportunities in general. Traditional process flow models may be useful when improving the efficiency or reach of a known process, but fail to support the new strategies. This has implications for the techniques and notations for analysing and specifying the requirements for IT systems.

Thirdly, some of the business strategies apply directly to the design and use of software components. In a world where the software user has an exponentially increasing choice of available components, the software components that will survive will be those that best fit the economic and ecological demands of these new business strategies. This means that, at least to some extent, the business strategies translate into component design strategies. Or patterns.

Finally, some of the emerging methods for designing component-based software systems can also be used for designing the new enterprise, as a network of distributed collaborating "components" of business activity.

I talked about some of these issues at the CBDi Forum meeting on October 14th in Birmingham.

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