Where is the next opportunity?

Whatever disaster occurs next, there is always someone able to turn it into an opportunity.  Look no further than the last dip in the economy and the associated Enron scandal.  Here was a company that lost millions of dollars overnight, causing distress to investors and employees alike.  However, from Enron came Sarbanes Oxley and as such a number of companies were created or changed direction to support SOX compliance and then went on to make money on the back of that disaster.

Now as we watch the latest downturn happening, we should be wondering what opportunities there will be and whether IT is ready for these changes.  Personally I can see a couple of things that are going to happen...  In the banking sector there is going to be new products that are going to appeal to buyers that are being cut off now.  For this, look no further than the 100% mortgages that were common in the UK just a few months ago and that have gone the way of the dinosaur. What is going to replace them when these banks must look to open up other revenue streams?  Governance is probably going to be one of the main areas of opportunity so that repeats of Bear Stearns are avoided at all costs.

From a technology perspective, I believe the following will be important: For those that have invested in SOA infrastructure, this is your moment to shine and to continue seeing the benefits.  Events will become important, and the ability to extract and view events, and then correlate them to monitor and also to drive new business processes will have a leading edge.  The other thing that is probably going to happen is M&A activity as values of companies go up and down. And as such those that have invested in agile, distributed and heterogeneous SOAs are going to show the wisdom of their investment as they give the business an opportunity to recoup their investment many times over.

SOA What? You should ensure that your SOA is ready for the new opportunities that will come.  What does that mean?  It means that the future is going to be a test of how quickly your SOA can change. It means that the rules may need be rewritten every month to support the constant change that is going to happen.  Will your SOA cope?