The Loosely Coupled Enterprise: The Secret to Speed and Flexibility

Computerworld - Loose coupling is one of those suddenly popular great ideas that have actually been around for a long time. With loose coupling come two significant benefits long sought by business and IT managers: flexibility and speed. The concept is about to move out of the technology infrastructure and address speed and flexibility at the enterprise level. It will change the enterprise in profound ways.

I'll let you in on a big secret: You don't have to implement a service-oriented architecture (SOA) to loosely couple the enterprise. In fact, burying the concept of loose coupling in technicalities has kept this important enterprise-level discussion under the radar screen of most senior business and technology managers. Loose coupling can be applied at all levels of the enterprise, including the entire spectrum of the business process, data and technology architecture. So the concept is slowly making its way up the chain of command into the executive suite. It may be riding on the coat tails of an SOA discussion, but we can live with that for now.

Fundamentally, loose coupling is founded on the idea of breaking something complex up into logically distinct parts. The absolute key to loose coupling is that the parts -- including the parts of the enterprise -- need to be designed in such a way that they are relatively autonomous. Autonomous design results in few dependencies. Loose coupling is basically this same idea of modularity. It's a basic principle of advanced design and engineering and a fundamental technique for solving complex problems. If your enterprise is complex, you need to understand the idea of loose coupling at a macro level. This is a CXO-level discussion.

The good news is that loose coupling isn't a very difficult concept to understand. One could argue that "Divide and conquer!" was one of the original ways of saying "Loosely couple!" although I think the original had a bit more pizzazz. Let's take a low-tech example of loose coupling. Skis, boots and bindings are loosely coupled, which results in a tremendous amount of flexibility for customers and manufacturers. There are lots of choices of skis, boots and bindings that work together in a loosely coupled manner. Skis, boots and bindings are "modules" that can be combined and swapped out in an evening's shopping trip.


A result of this modular approach is dramatically faster time-to-market. Parallel innovation occurs because manufacturers don't have to talk to one another a lot. The beauty of loose coupling -- or modularity -- is that it seems to birth a