Creating flexibility

Some-one refreshed my insight today into flexibility, especially in the alignment between business and information architecture and technology. He told me that inflexibility in information architecture and technology in relation to the business comes into existance if the (flexibility in the) model used for information architecture and technology is very different than the (flexibility in the) model of the business. In that case, simple changes in the business (for which flexibility they designed themselves) turn out to be very complex changes in information or technologie. In that case ICT becomes the main bottleneck for flexibility.

This might be a very good argument for the case of service orientation, if you use similar models of service decomposition throughout business architecture, information architecture and technology architecture. In that case, all models have the same flexibel and inflexible pieces, and the flexibility was in all models as chosen by the business (model). If anything, SOA gives flexibility (and inflexibility) design decisions back to the business in that case.

This is also a strong case for not using very different (disjoint) models in the different architectures.