Henry Ford invented what? The automobile? Nope. Oh yeah, the assembly line? Nope. What Ford *did* do was something more profound: he and his team discovered radical processes that could be brought to automobile production and dramatically lower costs, increase efficiency and raise quality. He didn’t invent the assembly line, he just mapped it on to automobile making in startlingly new ways and mass production was born.

Before Ford’s breakthrough, all automobiles were assembled in one spot, with all parts and people coming to it vs. the radical departure of having the auto move along an assembly line where parts and people were efficiently placed and able to assemble it dynamically.

This assembly line paradigm wasn’t new. Eli Whitney’s cotton gin manufacturing employed these principles as did the meat processing industry. One of Ford’s key managers visited a Chicago meat processing plant where he saw the dis-assembly of cows moving along a conveyor belt and had an “Aha!” moment where he realized that a reversed process could assemble goods.

All of this was brought back to Ford who’d been seeking better ways of producing cars and had a vision for consumerism. His next breakthrough of raising wages to $5 enabled his own production workers to actually afford the cars they were making.

In the enterprise world, today’s information technology architecture is all about running the business more efficiently and competitively. Cycle time reduction, business process and workflow, enterprise resource planning, analytics, are but a few of the buzz phrases that define the categories targeted.

Where do people fit in today’s IT architecture’s other than acting as production workers on a knowledge assembly line?  What is the breakthrough analog to today’s business and I.T. architectures that will rival Ford’s profound application of mass production?

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