Anthony Bradley

A member of the Gartner Blog Network

Anthony J. Bradley
GVP
3 years at Gartner
19 years in IT

Anthony J. Bradley is a group vice president in Gartner Research, managing teams that cover business process management, project and portfolio management, enterprise architecture, IT procurement, IT sourcing, and vendor management. Read Full Bio

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If You Don’t Reward Sharing and Reuse, You won’t Succeed with Web 2.0 or SOA

by Anthony J. Bradley  |  June 16, 2009  |  3 Comments

I cover how enterprises can build better IT solutions by capitalizing on Web 2.0 and SOA. The common thread here is really on gaining better sharing including both content and capability sharing. SOA, social solutions, cloud, and mashups all demand sharing and reuse. You’ll never achieve significant success in any of them without developing a culture of sharing and reuse. This is an immutable reality. I realize the above is a fairly obvious statement. I’ll follow this with another seemingly obvious statement. Here it is.

You will not develop a culture of sharing and reuse unless you systematically measure and publicly reward sharing and reuse.

If this is so obvious then why don’t more organizations do it? Is it that organizations don’t really want to encourage sharing and reuse? Is it because changing performance evaluation, corporate compensation, customer incentive, etc. programs is too difficult?

When I talk to enterprises about SOA and Web 2.0 and the necessity of rewarding sharing and reuse, I am surprised how few do it and am even more surprised when I hear a response that goes something like this, “We have a very structured approach to performance evaluation and compensation and we can’t [or won't] change it.”

What gives?

Luckily, we do have some research on this :-) (available to clients or for a fee).

3 Comments »

Category: SOA Web 2.0 mashups social solutions     Tags:

3 responses so far ↓

  • 1 If You Don’t Reward Sharing and Reuse, You won’t Succeed with Web 2.0 « Fredzimny’s CCCCC Blog   June 17, 2009 at 10:55 am

    [...] http://blogs.gartner.com/anthony_bradley/2009/06/16/if-you-dont-reward-sharing-and-reuse-you-wont-su... [...]

  • 2 Ed Julson   June 30, 2009 at 1:56 pm

    One of the big obstacles to reuse is that services are originally developed with a certain context in mind. That context is often specific to an application or business process and not entirely portable. Re-use does occur, but it’s more often a case of modifying existing services as opposed to building new ones. There are still big benefits with this approach, but it’s harder to track and quantify.

    If you can’t easily measure reuse, you can’t manage it. How many source control systems, build systems, IDE’s, or Registries are you aware of that measure re-use? As an IT mgr, even if you believe this is worthwhile, how do you measure it without using unsustainable and error prone manual tracking?

  • 3 Anthony Bradley   June 30, 2009 at 1:58 pm

    Agreed, that is why sharing is the other half. You need to build things that can be shared and then encourage reuse.