Loading ...A fresh look at the evolution of IT and Enterprise Software
Much has been written lately about traditional enterprise applications essentially being data entry “forms” and reporting structures, which are implemented to support desirable business processes and practices. It is surely a very complex set of structures, and it takes a very large number of professionals to design, maintain and upgrade these structures to ensure proper functionality, security, availability and performance for a very large number of customers. The most important reason for the rise of the Enterprise Application Software industry was economy of scale. Only 30 years ago all business applications were internally developed by a company’s IT organizations or contractors, with one exception of a General Ledger application available from McCormick & Dodge. The supply of qualified professionals was outstripped by the demand for software by a very wide margin.
There’s an old saying about those who forget history. I don’t remember it, but it’s good.
BTW Stephen Colbert just became another great American philosopher and linguist, challenging Yogi Bera for the top spot of the sole holder of this prestigious title.
The financial forecasters of the first quarter of the twentieth century were predicting a collapse of the American economy as a result of the shortage of qualified labor to support, a manual switch-based, newly popular telephone industry. Somehow the telephony and US economy “miraculously” survived this challenge of the time, but the rate of innovation by the US phone giants slowed down precipitously and now they are being leapfrogged by smaller companies and lesser developed countries. In fact “legacy” phone companies, protecting high returns on their outdated infrastructures, act as “brakes” on telecommunications innovation in the United States.
But I digress - I started to write about the enterprise software industry and its wonderful innovations like ……. Wait a minute, perhaps I did not digress at all, perhaps we are starting to see that the economy of scale is no longer producing desirable results? Or maybe the desirable results have changed? Or maybe both?
As wonderful as it is, SOA technologies are being utilized primarily to extend the life of legacy applications, to squeeze more life out of existing infrastructure which may or may not be throwing good money after the bad ones. What is the productive economic life expectancy for an IT infrastructure investment? When the law of diminishing returns stifle your IT organization’s budget and creativity?
With the proliferation of innovative technologies (like Iceberg and others) and deployment paradigms (like “Open Source”, Saas and PaaS) the deployment and/or development of enterprise business applications is no longer as labor intensive as it used to be, and different skills outside of software engineering are more critical.
The enterprises, and markets they serve, have also changed dramatically in the last couple of decades. So perhaps we need to take a fresh look at the processes we support and manage with the business applications of yesterday, so the next wave of productivity comes not from streamlining corporate communications and reporting, but rather by supporting knowledge gathering and development and extending communications beyond the garden walls of the enterprise.
There are many excellent blogs and other resources on the Internet which explore methodologies and Best Practices for business process re-engineering, project management, systems implementation, software engineering, and change management. However I could not find much help with unlocking value of integrated utilization of these disciplines to facilitate Organizational Transformation. In this blog I would like to focus on this subject. I would like to stress that this is not an academic inquiry, but a practitioner's desire to discuss and share practical business knowledge and Best Practices. Let's see how it evolves - "Every brilliant idea quickly degenerates into a lot of hard work" - Peter Drucker.