In some ways, today’s business environment is similar to the Internet era when, in the rush to embrace the Internet and to get a competitive edge, companies became preoccupied with e-commerce. In fact, instead of imagining a hybrid world, everyone said “clicks would replace bricks” and that retail would be changed forever. Others thought that it was not just about the transactions; they saw the larger vision of e-business. E-business was a new way of doing business. You can see the similarities to where we are today—the rush to adopt emerging technology and the misconception that business changes suddenly rather than gradually.

And today, there is a bigger world emerging on the horizon. From the work that IBM has been doing with business leaders and from the client engagements that IBM has been able to participate in, they have produced a study by the Institute of Business Value (IBV) on the business value of flexibility in this new world. The IBV did a study on the business value of service-oriented architecture (SOA). What they found was that those companies moving to what we would call the flex-pon-sive* world were seeing the results in flexibility from SOA.

What is SOA? SOA is a business-driven IT architectural approach that supports integrating your business as linked, repeatable business tasks or services. SOA helps today’s businesses innovate by ensuring that IT systems can adapt quickly, easily, and economically to support rapidly changing business needs. It helps customers increase the flexibility of their business processes, strengthen their underlying IT infrastructure, and reuse their existing IT investments by creating connections among disparate applications and information sources.

Flex-pon-sive*, a term I’ll talk more about in the next section, describes the capability to respond with lightning speed and agility to rapidly changing business needs. While 97 percent of them justified their first SOA project based on cost, 100 percent of them saw increased business flexibility, and 51 percent showed increased revenue growth. Now this is on a deep dive of 30 customers who are actually plunging into this innovative and flex-pon-sive* world today but doing so with an understanding lost in the e-business world. This new model will require that business changes, but at an incremental pace. This study complements the IBM Global CEO Study, which showed that companies were pursuing growth again and only secondly cost-cutting. Since that study was completed, competitive pressures have only increased—due to advances in technology, the rapid advent of globalization, and the consequent flat world. If there’s any change, it’s the insertion of an important qualifier—profitability. Profitable growth is now at the top of the list.

Download the complete whitepaper here!