Make Way for Interactions!

A recent and recurrent thread of conversation within my organization has been the "so now what?" angle of SOA, BPM, ESB, EAI, etc. bordering on the philosophic. The whole "why are we doing all this anyway?" kind of stuff.

And, we are starting to solidify around the idea of "Interactions" and "Interaction Management" as a good way to describe what it is a lot of us are really doing and a lot of what people are trying to get done with all those three-letter acronyms. Isn't it really all about taking an outside-in look at how you want to interact with the outside world and making sure that your internal systems and processes are enabling that and interacting themselves? Sure, it may be web services enabling those interactions, and it may be SOA principles guiding how you do it, and there is almost certainly some BPM going on to make it work right...but it's really all about Interactions.

Interestingly enough, there are some other folks out and about talking about Interaction Management as "the next big thing," namely Mike Gilpin over at Forrester as one good example. This is really starting to make a lot of sense to me and I think we're going to start hearing an awful lot more about this. Stay tuned...