Why SOA Does Not Deliver (2)
How relevant is IT to process?
In ‘Does IT matter?’ Nicolas G.Carr writes that ‘… in the 1990’s many strategic investments went to waste … and business executives have grown skeptical about IT, …’ and claims that IT is now a commodity and no longer producing a competitive advantage. I tend to agree, but the problem is not IT but what the business users request from IT!
Users want to organize their work in their own indescribable way, while management wants to rigidly control the user process. IT has absolutely no clue how to go about both, because the underlying technology (mostly because of Windows, Java and XML) has become nearly unmanageable. SOA simply adds to the already incredible complexity.
Business users are human and point at something to say: This I like and this I don’t. Once users see a cute GUI front-end they think the inside must be cute as well. Users buy a GUI, not architecture, flexibility or long-term manageability.
They demand however 99.99% availability (which is fine for the underlying mainframe-based, bank-transaction system); but when the average mental and physical availability of an employee is at most 50% then the availability expectation linked with the current complexity of technology creates the long rollout cycles. Users expect IT to be inhumane and that’s exactly what they get. And because they cant get what they want business is fighting for control over IT with Outsourcing and Governance. Bad idea!
Adherence to ineffective governance rules is usually more important than what constituents need, in case you have not yet noticed. On his ZD-Net blog Joe McKendrick asks to “Turn your SOA into a HOA (human oriented architecture)” and says, “Without governance, there is no SOA. But maybe we don’t want too much governance.” I want to add: Maybe we don’t want SOA at all if it requires even more rigidity to control and manage our business processes?
Business Process Decision Making:
Let’s face it: The AGILE-SOA-jBPEL-XML-enterprise can’t see beyond Tayloristic 2-D process graphs! The latest buzzword of ‘IT-Industrialization’ describes our plan to create Henry Ford conveyor-belt-IT-processes for lobotomized business users.
It gets worse. In 2005 Davenport and Harris further claimed in a MIT-Sloan article: “Rather than require people to identify the problems or to initiate the analysis, companies typically embed decision-making capabilities in the normal flow of work. Those systems then sense online data, apply codified knowledge or logic, and make decisions all with minimal amounts of human intervention.”
In “Super Crunchers: Why Thinking-by-Numbers Is the New Way to Be Smart” Ian Ayres too claims that huge data sets allow previously impossible predictions and that statistical methods are more accurate than the more intuitive conclusions drawn by experts.
From my perspective, Business Intelligence produces an unintelligible mess of data that has little to no meaning for business decisions, automated or not. Imagine that we not only make the processes more rigid but also the codified decision-making knowledge? That will ruin each and every business because the `statistical data facts’ are illusions and at best average values from the past that do not apply to the current point of decision. Face-to-face interviews with the relevant managers, employees and customers will give you an emotional intuitive feel for the right decision that statistics won’t.
You might ask: Emotions?
I have been asked to replace ‘emotions’ with ‘instinct’ because emotions is seen so negatively. I refuse! Instinct is more in the area of reflexes which do not require any thinking at all. Maybe feelings would be better, but feelings also require emotions deeper down in our human nature. I can go with intuition because intuition is an emotional function.
Today’s assumption is unfortunately that emotion or intuition is the opposite of reason. Maybe that is not so. Why can in the UK and the US the anti-depression drug Prozac be detected in the rivers? Because people are continuously forced to be reasonable and not emotional. Look inside yourself and you will feel that it is against human nature and it makes us sick.
Human decision-making is most likely an emotionally weighted pattern-matching ability of the brain. Rationality is only used for post-decisions justification or verification. Are not strong managers and entrepreneurs mostly very emotional, even unreasonable people? Absolutely! Pioneers such as Broca (1878), Papez (1937), and MacLean (1952) suggested that emotion is related to a group of structures in the center of the brain called the limbic system, which includes the hypothalamus, cingulate cortex, and hippocampi among others. Antonio Damasio - today Professor of Neuroscience at the University of Southern California - has long researched neural systems for memory, language, emotion, and decision-making. In his 1994 book, “Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain,” he documents his discovery that “humans with dysfunctional emotional centers face grave difficulties in decision-making.” Thus human decisions - intuitive or not - are emotionally weighted and how do you want to encode that, Mr. Process-Analysis-Consultant?
To improve decision making with the help of computing we need to invent technology to model intuitive human decision-making far beyond logical rules. While Ian Ayres mentions neural networks and pattern matching he fails to understand that both do not need statistical data but decision-points linked to real data. It is not important how many people took a certain decision, but what data pattern was used by each individual to come to the decision. Therefore we do not need to crunch meaningless and inaccurate data with unproven mathematical assumptions, but today’s computing power has to be used to interactively learn decisions from humans.
Max Pucher