Blog: Richard Hackathorn

« Mixing Old Wine in a New Wine Skin | Main | Did You Know ... Shift Happens? »

Where to Pick Your Battles

Over breakfast I had a delightful chat with Richard Buckle, an experienced, well-traveled student of the IT industry. He is quite a blogger, rather extensive in his comments and subtle (not!) in his humor. See his latest blogging creation.

An issue that surfaced amid our eggs and pancakes was the impact of Web 2.0 technology. I was relaying my perceptions from the IBM IOD Conference. In particular, I was surprised by IBM's emphasis of Web 2.0 as an essential part of future enterprise architectures. I even queried a panel of IBM executives on the sanity of executing such flaking technology on sacred mainframe systems.

The answer that I got involves the careful choosing of one's IT battles within the enterprise. Given the demands of today's global businesses and given the complexity of relevant information to the business, traditional IT has no hope to satisfy all those requirements. Doing IT as the same will result in a chaos far beyond the proliferation of user-created spreadsheet systems of the last decade. Using Web 2.0, leave the User Interface layer to the users, because each will want something different and will want it NOW.

Choose, instead, battle lines around supplying quality enterprise information through a Service Oriented Architecture organized by key business processes.

Hmmmm This is a new twist - a political one - to the whole SOA discussion. For more details, see Richard's blog.

Posted by Richard Hackathorn on Friday, 2 November 2007 | Permalink