Chunking is the only way to go

Change comes swiftly, it is fast paced and reveals itself in bursts of innovations. There are 3 distinctive trends which drive this wave of change.

Distributed world, the world is becoming more and more a distributed working environment due to;

• globalization (space)
  
• specialization of products and professionals (granularity)
• 24 X 7 economy (time)
• outsourcing of non-core activities (de-centralized)
  

Collapsing lead times, yesterday’s value-added products and service are becoming today’s commodities due to;

• global competitive pressures
• shift from atoms to bits
• shortened product cycles
• shift from business chain to business webs

Customer driven & service focused, customers are expecting

• customized products
• commodity prices
• excellent service

This poses severe pressures on Business Services & Processes as well as on IT Services.
Agile Business and IT development strategies are crucial.
The best approach is by chunking. Chunking is the composing and decomposing of small chunks, self contained services, which relate to each other in a loosely coupled way. Loosely coupled means that you can take out an old chunk or add a new chunk without sending a tidal wave of change all others.
Chunks are like playing with lego blocks, combining and re-combing new services into adaptive or innovative IT services or business models.
Independend chunks makes it possible to have

• distributed development across geographic boundaries, time zones and around the clock
• re-use of existing chunks keeps prices at a minimum
  
• re-use of tried and tested chunks secure quality
• combining and re-combing chunks provides customized services with minimum maintenance

Ten chunks with six properties will give an opportunity space of 1.000.000 end products while maintenance is restricted to 10 chunks or 60 features. Right ?