The Agile Architecture Revolution: How Cloud Computing, REST-Based SOA, and Mobile Computing Are Changing Enterprise IT by Jason Bloomberg

Author:Jason Bloomberg
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2012-01-23T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter 7

The Democratization of Enterprise IT

We expect this book to have a broader audience than your average techie book: business people as well as techies, architects and implementers, denizens of enterprise IT departments as well as people who work at smaller organizations, start-ups, or technology firms. The Agile Architecture Revolution will impact all of us, after all. But if you haven't worked in, or consulted for, an enterprise IT department, you have no idea how, well, otherworldly they are.

By otherworldly, we mean that they have big-company ways of thinking, talking, working, and making decisions—even though they are responsible for, and work with, technology every day. But if you look at the rest of the technology marketplace—consumer tech, small/midsize business tech, technology in academia, as well as Web-based (oops, we mean Cloud-based) companies, you gain a very different perspective on technology than the “enterprisey” view of big-organization IT.

Here are some examples. How much do you expect to pay for a piece of software? Nothing at all maybe? Okay, 99 cents? Ten bucks? Maybe you want some business software, so maybe $500? What about tens of millions of dollars or more? In enterprises, price tags with more than six zeroes at the end are commonplace.

Fine, let's say you bought that software, and now it's time to install it. How many files do you get from the vendor to execute the install process, and how long does it take? From an app store, one installer file and maybe a couple minutes at most. On your computer, maybe a bit longer. What about enterprise software? That package you just bought might come in over 10,000 separate files and require months to install. (Okay, months is a worst case, but you get my point.)

Next, you need to get that software to actually work. Wait, doesn't installing it mean that when you're done, you can use it? Not in the enterprise. Installing is only the first step. Integration, configuration, training, change management, data cleansing, and numerous other steps need to take place before we can do anything useful with that software.

Finally, it's time to use the software, so take a look at its user interface. Attractive, friendly, intuitive, self-explanatory, and dynamic, right? To be fair, these criteria set a high bar for even the slickest consumer software, but enterprise software's user interfaces are generally 20 years behind. Yes, some enterprise software packages have nice interfaces, but those are few and far between, compared to the number of kludgy, awkward interfaces most of today's enterprise apps exhibit.

You get the picture. The question, however, is what are we going to do about it? Something's got to give—and it's the enterprise IT department. The old way of doing things is simply too expensive and too inflexible to survive. But change isn't easy, of course. If you're in enterprise IT, ZapThink 2020 Crisis Points are in your future—if not your present!

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