08.24.10
Can You Feel the Ground Rumbling?
[Cartoon]
There is a sense about this time, that we are about to experience another rebirth in information technology. It is as though we are in a cocoon and about to emerge into a new form.
Change in information technology has always been a way of life. As more and more information processing has been taken over by computing systems, the solutions have become much larger. To cope with this continuous growth, major concepts have been developed that have brought about significant positive change to help manage the complexity.
In the very early days of computers, stored programs changed everything. Logic could be stored and used over and over again using programmer-friendly languages. Then centralized data bases emerged to handle information shared across multiple programs. Database came with concepts for organizing the data and the data relationships. The complex program structures were first organized using subroutines and then object-oriented concepts introduced structures to define responsibilities and logically handle exceptions.
The ability to handle exceptions was a major conceptual change. This approach helped improve the stability of executing programs, but it also came with a major underlying change. Developers recognized that occasionally events occurred that a developer could not foresee and write code to handle.
More recently, architectural structures have focused on standardizing program interfaces. The first efforts addressed reusable infrastructure components. This allowed for selecting from multiple infrastructure component providers for needed services. Business components have entered into this new architecture by providing business functionality following the concept of Service-Oriented Architecture.
With all of these components, there has been a movement towards using an Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) as the glue to connect services and references to services. Many believe that this will allow the IT organization to retain central control and more easily utilize services provided through cloud computing.
While all of these great concepts have been developing, the general populace has continued to become more computer savvy. There is a strong feeling by many that there will be a shift in control of information technology. The belief is that the centralized Information Technology organizations will be replaced by some new modern approach to drive the connectivity of services. The use of an ESB is only a preview of the problem that needs to be solved. The simple, conceptual approach, that will allow everyone to just plug in may be about to happen. Enterprise Architects can feel the ground shaking.
The Enterprise Architects can see what is coming and are already preparing. They know that this will be their time. Corporations will be able to completely focus on their business, and automation will be viewed as an agile enabler. Automation will finally become the self-service contributor that the Corporate Office has always wanted it to be. –Enterprise Architects Masters of the Unseen City
Closing the Business / IT gap
