Nick Malick has an interesting (long) post up today on Inside Architecture describing a conceptual framework for standardizing line-of-business (LOB) applications.

Nick's model breaks down into three categories: Supporting, Industry-Specific, and Business Differentiating capabilities. Nick sees what a lot of people see, which is that at the Supporting level there are a lot of commonalities in LOB apps even between markets and companies... everyone stores contact information, billing information, millions of names and addresses and phone numbers and do things with them, across the breadth of enterprise, which are duplicated hundreds and thousands of times. Such a situation should be ripe for standards; moreover, the appropriate standards model should, as Nick says, allow companies to collaborate easily, much more easily than they can currently.

Conceptually, I'm on the same page with Nick but, having been peripherally involved with an effort to achieve somethings similar some years ago, I'm not sure it's quite so easy a proposition as it seems when laid out comfortably in nicely colored diagrams. Each company seems to have some quirk, even at the most basic level, which dictates how their functions are performed, and although it always seems as though it should be possible to create a generic function for basic capabilities, there is a lot of resistance... which, whether for good reasons or poor, is the death of standards.

Nick explicitly sets his discussion apart from cloud-based or shared services and says that he is addressing a different problem, but it seems to me that most of the businesses which are willing and capable of moving to generic capability models will likely end up using hosted, shared services to solve these collaboration issues (why reinvent the wheel?), while those which are not will be unable to implement the sort of standards Nick suggests regardless of how much sense they seem to make. I think the future of collaboration, even at that base level, will probably be SOA based, where the capability model may remain unique to the company, but black-box services can provide select information and processes selectively outside the internal architecture.