I do apologise for the fact that in this particular blog abbreviations will be flying around like grilled geese in the land of Cockaigne
As described, a palace revolution is about changes in culture, economy, and socio-political institutions
The cultural revolution has been ongoing for decades now, with entire countries wondering about (the state and future of) their culture due to disappearing frontiers on the currency, economical and national border level
We're right in the middle of the economical one with the current crisis
Social media is now invading the earth: 300 million people on Facebook, 50 million on Twitter - and let's not
forget Google, YouTube and the Wiki (a truely fabulous project obliterating all information barriers) - just check it all out although that data is half a year old already
Communism has disappeared during the 1990's onwards, and currently capitalism is getting hit hard
So what about IT revolution?
Well we had CORBA and COM and after that OO and after that SOA and maybe we're moving towards SCA or EDA, right? In other words, we still have programs, modules and functions and are still trying to find out how to define their scope so we can just nuts and bolts them together across applications, systems and even enterprises
Well, errrr, we went from point-to-point to EAI and then ESB and now we call it all either B2B or B2C, even G2G (government) or E2E (enterprise), while forgetting that you can't have any of those without a decent A2A (application), in the meantime staring at how the entire world is connecting people to people
Oh wait! Didn't we have RAD and IAD evolve into RUP and Agile from LAD? In other words, aren't we doing projects faster so we can almost catch up with the time-to-market needed by the business?
Listen. It's IT we're talking about, and we should be experts in that by now
Our core business is not doing projects, our core business is giving the business IT systems that are -and continue to be- fit for use. That entire lifespan of an application (it will be called a federation in a few years from now, mark my words) is about 5-10 times greater than the initial project phase
Our core business is not engaging in whatever-to-whatever, our core business is unifying the very diverse IT systems into that one coherent business system, so we can just easily extend our own business processes outside our enterprise. B2B nor B2C ever was a goal, it is just a means to do more business for less money. If you're conducting business on a bleeding IT platform, how would EDI make your life less unpleasant?
Our core business is not reinventing the wheel nor making it rounder by means of ever-changing approaches and tools, our core business is scoping the fine lines between programs, modules and functions so they'll become default building blocks representing business processes, business process steps, and business process step shared functionalities. Why is it so (very) much easier to assemble or buy a car than an application?
IT needs a palace revolution, that's for sure. Will the revolutionaries please stand up?
