Article at a glance:

Flexible IT, better strategy

Most CEOs would cringe at the idea that IT architecture—the way technology resources are organized—determines the agility with which companies can carry out good strategy. Yet the difficulty and cost of modifying today's rigid IT architectures, dominated by big enterprise applications such as ERP, can be so high that some companies would rather abandon new strategic initiatives than make a single change to the applications they already have in place. Good news is on the horizon in the form of service-oriented architectures, which promise to reduce if not remove the current obstacles.

The take-away

In this article, John Seely Brown and John Hagel III compare flexible service-oriented architectures to the more rigid IT architectures that preceded them. The authors make the case that information technology, far from lacking strategic worth, determines strategic value.