Our digital economy will evolve as data is what drives economic activity. Integration is expensive and slow today. Human action, bulk data processing, and historical data are some of the things we rely on. What if we could make the exchange of real-time data cheap and instantaneous?

It will become less expensive to connect cause and effect across the internet with the evolution of technologies that I describe in this book. This will lead to dramatic growth in the number of integrations that organizations execute. These are the conditions for a Cambrian explosion that would change the way the world works. I will show why this explosion is inevitable. The World Wide Flow will be similar to the World Wide Web in that it will link the world?s activity.

Large parts of the book are speculative and it was difficult to write it. It may be a decade before any World Wide Flow technologies are considered mainstream. It will probably be three to five years before the strong contender for the necessary programming interface and data protocols are available for experimentation. Why write the book now?

There are lessons learned from decades of distributed systems evolution. As a global technology community, we tend to dismiss the possibilities that lie before us, to focus on how to make incremental improvement to the world we know today. No one has a crystal ball, that’s a good reason.

Tools that can give us insight into general trends are available. We can find places where evolution is likely to happen by analyzing the landscape of technologies. To demonstrate 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, I will use Wardley Mapping and Promise Theory.

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 show you why flow is almost certain to be.

Chapter 1 introduces you to the concept of flow, from its basic definition to the key concepts that fall under that definition. The case for why businesses, governments, non-profits, and a number of other institutions will embrace flow will be made in Chapter 2. The case for why flow is almost certain to happen and what the key components of flow systems are likely to be will be made in Chapter 3.

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. Chapter 5 will discuss where key innovations are required to support true flow systems in the future. Chapter 6 ends with a survey of the things you can do to prepare for a flow future and help make that happen.