The idea of service orientation

The phrase, “Easy to do business with” has become a major driver for most companies. The idea of service orientation is to provide customer value by contracting others to do what a company has to do just to get by, and by focusing the company's own resources on what it does best. By subscribing to the commodity functionality provided by service providers who can perform it better, faster, and cheaper an organization can minimize its cost of market participation. This strategy releases energy for an organization to concentrate on its core competencies, thus bringing value to market through what the organization does best, thus making it easy to do business with. By taking a service-oriented approach, in an increasingly complex and competitive market, products can then be taken to market quickly and business processes conducted in agile response to change through multiple channels.

Such is the compelling attraction of service orientation. But “Wait a minute,” we hear top management say, “We might be serving the same customer, but we are a complex organization with multiple business units each with different targets, and supported by different technologies with different capabilities. We'll let the faster-moving, more profitable business units continue to do their own thing and just outsource the rest without worrying too much about the provider. That way we'll be service-oriented but we can't afford an integrated approach.”