[via Phil Windley] ebizQ quotes Gartner’s Roy Schulte, starting with an apt analogy “for developing truly agile enterprises, which can react more quickly to changes in business conditions than the old-fashioned kind of organization.”
Changing a trucks direction is easier than making a train go where the tracks dont.
If you want the train to move over one foot, you have to do an immense amount of work tearing up and re-laying tracks. On the other hand, all you need to do to turn the more agile truck is move the steering wheel.
If you find youre not selling many SUVs and you want to transfer the assembly line over to some other kind of car, youd like to be able to (easily) reconfigure that business process.
Traditional business strategies are not event driven. Many companies, for instance, build to stock. On the other hand, an event-driven approach sees products being built to order. This allows customization and reduces inventory-carrying costs.
Event-driven, service-oriented architectures integrate three kinds of data: reference data, such as the number of trucks in a fleet; state data, such as the number of trucks under repair; and event data, such as a delivery being completed.
