Notes
Smart businesses with no application intelligence
The amount of information produced by organizations these days is staggering: each employee, each system and with RFID each piece of inventory, produces reams of information every second of the day. As a result a whole industry has been built on business intelligence: how to filter and cut through this data to make intelligent, and timely, decisions.
But what about the most complex systems in your organizations? The applications that run your business, the ones that drive and shape this immense information flow, are opaque monoliths, 2001-style. These are highly critical, front-page-of-the-newspaper-type systems and only a couple of people can even guess what is inside of them. Think about this for a minute: we live in a world where I can see what my nephew had for breakfast this very minute, but where Fortune 500 bank has a hard time integrating the CRM from an acquisition? What is going on?
The world is changing at a incredible speed and our information systems are increasing in complexity at an even greater one. Most organizations, public or private, are struggling, and failing, to balance these two forces of nature. States find it too costly to change tax rates. Banks merge, but can not merge their databases. The situation has gotten so out of hand that building a green field application or buying a COTS ones, which will hopefully do whatever the existing system does, has become the most popular way for organizations to deal with this problem. Another one to thing about: taking on the huge risk by starting from scratch is apparently the best we can do.
A lot of IT trends are remedies to symptoms of this problem. Software as a Service is about moving responsibility of change away. SOA is adding a layer of basic understanding across your application-scape and breaking up monoliths into multiple pockets of complexity. Reducing power consumption would be easy if we even knew how much power we are spending on what is important versus what is not, or if it would be easy to move that mainframe application into the cloud. Agile is a way of pacing change in applications by slowing down changes in the business to a constant trickle.
We, as an information based economy, need a new discipline, and a new breed of tools, processes and people to deal with this problem in the future. Because it is only going to get worse. We need application intelligence.
