Integration is key to the way our digital economy will evolve, as data is what drives economic activity. Today, integration across organizational boundaries is expensive and slow. We rely a lot on human action, bulk data processing, and historical data to make our markets run and our institutions operate. So, the question becomes, what if we could make the exchange of real-time data relatively cheap and nearly instantaneous?

With the evolution of technologies that I describe in this book, it will soon become much less expensive to connect cause and effect across the internet. This, in turn, will lead to both dramatic growth in the number of integrations that organizations execute, and an acceleration of economic experimentation. These are the conditions for a Cambrian explosion, of sorts—a hearty soil for dramatic new solutions that change the way the world works. And I will demonstrate why this explosion is nearly inevitable. Like HTTP created the World Wide Web and linked the world’s information, what I call “flow” will create the World Wide Flow and link the world’s activity.

This was a challenging book to write in many ways, not the least of which is that large parts of it are speculative. It may be a decade before any World Wide Flow technologies are considered “mainstream.” It will probably be three to five years before the reasonably strong contenders for the necessary programming interfaces and data protocols are available for experimentation. So why write the book now?

The answer lies in the lessons learned from decades of distributed systems evolution prior to today. We, as a global technology community, tend to dismiss the possibilities that lie before us; to focus on how to make incremental improvement to the world we know today rather than prepare for tomorrow’s disruptions. There is a good reason for that: none of us have a crystal ball.

However, we do have tools that can give us insight into general trends that are likely to happen. We can intelligently analyze the landscape of technologies and user needs to find places where evolution—or revolution—is likely to happen. I will use two of these—Wardley Mapping and Promise Theory—to demonstrate both what components are required for flow, and why those components will evolve from their form today to a form that encourages ubiquitous event-driven integration.

Cloud computing caught many organizations flat-footed, which resulted in advantages for their competitors or missed opportunities to serve their missions. My goal with this book is to help you see not only what flow means, but why it is almost certain to be.

Chapter 1 will then introduce you to the concept of flow, from its basic definition to the key concepts that fall from that definition. Chapter 2 will make the case for why businesses, governments, non-profits, and a number of other institutions will embrace flow as it emerges. In Chapter 3, I’ll use Wardley Mapping and Promise Theory to make the case for why flow is almost certain to happen, and what the key components of flow systems are likely to be.

Chapter 4 surveys the messaging and event-driven architectures available today that will either guide or form the basis of flow systems in the future. Building on that and the Wardley Map we defined in Chapter 3, Chapter 5 will discuss where key innovations are required to support true flow systems in the future. Chapter 6 then concludes the discussion with a survey of the things you can do today to both prepare for a flow future, and to help make that future happen.