Trust Is Paramount

Effective loose coupling requires the formation of long-term relationships among business participants that are far richer than conventional transaction-based relationships. Loose coupling cannot work without significant investment in building trust-based relationships among participants. These business elements need to be woven together with technology elements to provide the foundation for shared meaning, trust and orchestration to develop and evolve.

So far, the loosely coupled approach to business process management has been implemented across the boundaries of enterprises in order to coordinate business processes spanning multiple companies. We expect that, over time, this approach will be applied to business process management within the enterprise as well. Hard wiring within the enterprise has given companies cost savings, but at the expense of flexibility. As companies see the performance benefits of loose coupling, they will want to embrace this approach within the enterprise to enhance flexibility there as well.

CIOs are naturally positioned to play a leadership role in helping companies to adopt and deploy these loosely coupled technology platforms. They would do well to start with business functions that have the greatest interaction with third parties (for example, sales and marketing, customer support, procurement and supply chain management). This completely flips the historical pattern of IT deployment that started within the centralized "glass house" and eventually reached functions that dealt with external business partners and only in a very limited way touched business partners (for example, through EDI connections and Web-based portals). By tying IT architecture evolution to the most pressing current business needs, CIOs can mobilize support from their business colleagues for more ambitious architectural migration strategies.

More broadly, CIOs can help nontechnology line executives to understand the compelling benefits created by a loosely coupled design approach. In focusing on the business applications of loose coupling, CIOs have the potential to become major players in the next wave of innovation.

John Hagel and John Seely Brown are co-authors of a new book called The Only Sustainable Edge: Why Business Strategy Depends on Productive Friction and Dynamic Specialization. Hagel is a management consultant who spent 16 years with McKinsey & Company. He can be reached at john@johnhagel.com. Brown, the former chief scientist at Xerox, is now a visiting scholar at the University of Southern California. He can be reached at jsb@johnseelybrown.com