12.02.10
The Democratization of Technology
[Cartoon]
The smart phone is the greatest sign of the democratization of technology. In your hand is a powerful computer with internet access. Smart phones process faster and store more information than any of the first computers used in business.
As with any form of democracy, smart phones come with responsibility. It is our decision and only our decision, to select our phone. It is our decision to select the services we want. We then need to learn how to operate our phone. We need to set the options on the phone. We must tolerate and upgrade our phone every two or three years.
If the responsibilities sound a lot like those you have heard from your corporate IT organization, you are right. There are many parallels. For example, have you ever heard members of your IT organization talk about operating systems? Now you, too, must choose between Apply, Droid, Blackberry, and Palm. Remember all the discussion about using open source software and licensed software? Now you must decide to use free applications or pay for the software.
You would think that this new awareness would result in a more sympathetic audience to the central IT performance. Unfortunately for central IT, it has gone in the opposite direction. Everything seems so easy on the smart phone that everyone believes that corporate IT has been making things more complicated. Possibly, they have made it more complicated to maintain their non-democratic control.
Enterprise Architects must be careful in this new environment. They know that the apparent simplicity of the smart phones has come about due to masking an enormous complexity of integrated frameworks. These are the things not seen by the user of a smart phone. To move forward, all complexity must be masked to appear simple.
For years, the corporate IT group has for years been given the challenge of providing integrated solutions. They do not have the luxury of building applications that simply access information. In a business setting, applications must communicate with one another. Today, business applications communicate using an Enterprise Service Bus, business services, Business Process Management, and file systems. These are layers of application integration complexity that corporate IT has always needed to manage.
With democratization of technology, the frameworks to support application integration will be needed. These frameworks need to come in the form of simplicity rather than the complex solutions used by corporate IT. Providing simplicity will require universal standards that make it easy to combine the functionality of applications.
The business environment architecture has moved from applications towards service-enabled components. Possibly this will be the next big shift for smart phone functionality. What is great about the possibilities is that they will be driven by the consumer. No longer will the central corporate IT group be able to dictate the acceptable solutions.
Enterprise Architects are well-aware of the continuing evolution of technology. They creatively look for technology convergence that can provide breakthroughs in thinking. We are at one of those convergent junctions today. What is about to happen will give non-professional information technologists control of their use of automation in their business. No longer will they simply peer through windows and see only what applications let them see. They will be able to go inside, see how things work, and control their automation. – Enterprise Architects Masters of the Unseen City
Closing the Business / IT gap.
