The Next Leap in Productivity: What Top Managers Really Need to Know about Information Technology

6.6. What Does the Enterprise Leap in Productivity Look Like?

The Enterprise Leap in productivity can be measured not in IT quantities such as "lines of code per head," but in traditional business metrics such as revenue growth, market share, and profitability. It may be hard to capture an exact return on investment (ROI) from making the investments in IT that I am advocating in this book, because if you follow my advice to its logical conclusion, you will be transforming your entire organization, not merely IT. The returns on investment will be widely spread.

Let's imagine some scenarios of what that might look like.

Say you are a manufacturing concern with plants in 12 U.S. states, two countries in Europe, and one in South America. Imagine that you have warehouses and a fleet of trucks, and that a third of your customers are in the Far East.

Before SOA, each plant probably had its own applications that kept track of operations, its own small IT group, and a plant comptroller in charge of collecting financial information and rolling it up to corporate headquarters in the appropriate format. Switching manufacturing loads from one plant to another was a subjective process involving a lot of guesswork and politics.

With SOA, you can model all the activities going on in all your operational sites. Using BPM, you can examine entirely new ways of organizing the workflow by simulating Web service–enabled processes. When you find one you like, the optimized workflow can be rapidly deployed ...