The immutable nature of....

I returned to work today from a six week leave of absence. The first week I spent in the hospital, recovering from pneumonia (I hope we never lose the drug barrier). That left me with a bunch of 'reading days.' I really enjoyed The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell, so I asked my brother to bring his copy of Gladwell's latest book, Blink. There, among chapters on thin slicing, Cook County General, and Paul Ekman,there was a chaper that addressed the concept of net centric war-fare.

I found the discussion of the Milennium Challenge 2002 and Lt. Gen. Paul Van Riper quite fascinating. His approach to the challenge was, in many ways contradictory to the principles of the Joint Vision 2020 - which many people seem to cite as the underpinning of a SOA within the US DoD. I dug a little more and found an interview that Lt. Gen. Van Riper gave to NOVA. In this interview, Van Riper discusses the danger of placing too much faith in technology at the expense of a deeper understanding of the nature of war....

'We hear many terms, whether it's "transformation," "military technical revolution," "revolution of military affairs," all indicating something revolutionary has happened that's going to change warfare. Nothing has happened that's going to change the fundamental elements of war. The nature of war is immutable, though the character and form will change. The difficulty is that those who put forth this argument believe that something fundamentally has changed, and you can change very quickly without thinking your way through it. They want to apply the technology without the brainpower.'

We hear much ado from industry about how SOA will transform the way business happens. Sure much of this is really marketing-speak. (I recognize that promotion plays an important part of commerce, so this isn't a bashing on marketing). However, there is a certain belief that technology - particularly the latest and greatest - will transform/create a competitive edge/etc. So I started thinking, what can we learn from these observations about the fundamentally unchanging nature of war?

Basically, for me, it is intuitively obvious that SOA technologies are about changing the character and form of business - but the nature of business itself doesn't change. We specialize our capabilities. We find ways to add-value. We bring together supplier and demanders. We prove or disprove economic theories. Much like the nature of war itself doesn't change, the nature of business doesn't change either....therefore, SOA is about the form of business when effected through IT. Stated more simply, SOA is how manifest the business through supporting information technology.

So what else can we learn? The interview continues with "The first thing you have to understand is how you plan to fight in the future or in a particular engagement, a particular war. And once you understand how you're going to fight, then you bring the technology to it. If you lead with the technology, I think you're bound to make mistakes."

Great parallels! The application of SOA to a problem starts with the business. Here as well, we can learn from the seemingly boundless supply of military history and strategy. With a pure technology approach, we're bound to make mistakes....There isn't much of a bigger endorsement that I could imagine for a holistic approach to SOA.