As business rules become
separated from application logic, and companies wrestle with developing
agility, the times are reminiscent in a way of the evolution of the
Internet, and the early attempts to separate content from medium. The
most visible success from this was the development of the blog as a
content management system. Once content became writeable by non-tech
users, content burgeoned across the Web, with results that hardly need
to be described today.
Similarly, as content and data
became editable, and then recomposable as in mashups – all of which is
happening now – the global network expanded into possibilities that are almost
bewildering in their variety.
The allusion to the Web is
pertinent here because, as IT tries to chart to best course for its
organization’s development, no one can ignore the benefits that have
accrued to the global network through the Web 2.0 developments, and the
lessons are valuable ones.
Dion Hinchcliffe has made the point that the role of the user is not a great one in SOA, but it’s a crucial one in Web 2.0.
Similarly, IT sees that Enterprise 2.0 is coming,
and the value of the knowledge worker on the intranet is a source of
prosperity and survival for the company trying to morph itself into
customer centricity. Somehow this all needs to be provided for, yet
without destroying the legacy systems.
The choices for
action are many but the principles are few, and can be tightly stated
as this: hedge all bets productively. This is not a glib slogan, this
is the underlying path of modern software evolution; no one in the
enterprise wants to get locked in with either vendors or code anymore;
everyone wants maximum flexibility for future discretionary development.
We
have to say that this is an age that could have been made for Dovetail
Software. While the companies with legacy Clarify installs seek to
evolve beyond proprietary code into more agile configurations, Dovetail
CRM slips right into the computing environment, seamlessly replacing and enhancing the Amdocs applications with better and more nimble thin clients.
IT
expects multiple benefits per technology choice nowadays, and deploying
Dovetail yields a development platform that accommodates open standards
and Web services. Furthermore, by virtue of Dovetail’s exclusive use of
open standards in development, the system proves to integrate quite straightforwardly with much of the rest of the IT stack.
Integration
is one of the major stumbling blocks to progress in enterprise
development, and one of the spurs to more agile deployment of
resources. But the ways to proceed forward are a challenge. SOA is difficult to implement, and while SOA is not services – services are not the requisite component that makes SOA -
nevertheless, services are the most practical and obvious way for
companies to evolve their legacy stack into reusable resources.
Enterprise
architect Michael Hugos advocates building lightweight, essentially
throwaway applications to meet intermediate needs:
”’Should we build our systems fast, or should we
build them good?’ The agile answer is to build them fast and good
enough for now [...] Advantage goes to companies that develop systems
that are ready when the business needs them and don’t cost more than
the opportunity is worth.” – Agility Is First and Foremost a Frame of Mind
And while there is increasing commentary around the bottom-up versus the top-down approach to SOA, there is no doubt that governance is the primary key to the way forward.
We’ll
spend some time this week looking more closely at these issues and
others in the task of developing agility in the modern enterprise.
