Crisis 2.0: Menace or Turning Point?

There’s a crisis, you say? We are witnessing crises taking hold in many verticals including housing, financial services, manufacturing and others. There's the housing crisis. The bond crisis. The gas crisis. And these macro-crises are event beginning to put pressure on IT, where we're seeing something of a mini-crisis of confidence with IT pros pondering what might happen to IT projects like SOA.

Why is crisis good? Because it’s in the proverbial pressure-cooker that real innovation occurs. Darwin wrote it. Kanye West sang it. Most recently, Ron Tolido at Capgemini blogged it in “Crisis! Hurray, Crisis!”. Ron makes a very defensible case that companies that face crises are more apt to look for innovative solutions to truly help them leapfrog the status quo and solve longstanding problems that had been previously ignored or solved by long-term, big-ticket investments.

On a more personal level, we have witnessed an upsurge of interest in mashup technologies in the last few months and, to be candid, we weren’t quite certain there was any single cause. But Ron’s post led me to my AHA! moment. Mashups are front-and-center for many of today’s most innovative enterprise leaders because they need innovations like mashups to hack a path back to stability, growth and profitability. In fact, some have begun to posit that service-driven solutions have the opportunity to really shine instead of being a victim of those cutbacks that are so common in times of crisis.

This reminds me of a saying attributed to Jawarhalal Nehru, one of the leaders for independence in 1940’s India:

“A leader or a man of action in a crisis almost always acts subconsciously and then thinks of the reasons for his action.”

Innovative leaders are now hearing that little voice in back of their head that’s demanding different approaches and technologies than what they did in the past. If crisis drives need and need drives adaptation, then crisis is good.