Can Man (I mean applications) ever truly be an island?
In the late 1500s John Donne postulated that "No man is an island, entirely of itself". In essence that we impact each other, outside factors affect us and more importantly we leave an impression on others. This thought that to try and operate alone, cut off from outside stimulus and contact with others is both unnatural and almost a crime to our very humanity. (The full quote is actually quite insightful and can be read here.)
The question I have, is this true with all complex systems in life, especially those dynamic and complex IT systems? Now while this might sound silly to many of us who live in a world of technology where of course every action has a reaction and once I deploy something if left alone will continue to operate the same way forever; and yet when we factor in ourselves, the users into the equation that might not necessarily be the case.
Take for instance a basic application that lists houses that are for sale. Left alone for decades, real estate agents added new entries into the MLS (Multiple Listing Service) databases for review by other agents. Slowly without changing the database, companies or sometimes just users started to mine that information and put it on a web interface. Others started to add mapping software or crime overlays, and other web 2.0 tools that bring about a level of useability never foreseen in early concepts, in essence the needs of the users have dictated how information is to be digested and utilized. Society which wants real time access, it also wants to add various peripheral data on top of a single view; in essence the growth of the web and recently web 2.0 forced the application environment to change.
An IT department, especially those that support applications that turn a blind eye to the changes in society and their users will be caught off guard no less than when the infrastructure team at Service Providers missed one of the greatest growth of network traffic be in P2P and video. We need to see what is coming in the environment, in our users, and understand how it has the potential to improve our core applications and processes. How are our users going to want to utilize and receive information (phone vs. laptop, voice vs. data); how are they going to want to collaborate between friends and co-workers? A seemingly static CRM or ERP system needs to leverage tools from other places to truly support our users.
This week we will be talking about the impact that the network can have on applications and of course the reverse. We will be hearing from experts both on the network side and application side. Curious to hear your thoughts as well.
Posted by Matthew Stein at 11:14AM PST
Partha Venkatavaradhan Feb 3, 2009
Based on what I have been observing on the applications that I work, I could clearly draw out one conclusion - applications either directly ‘handshake’ with other applications or ‘diced’ - more technically, componentized - and then made to handshake. While in the first case the application gets ‘integrated’ on the second case it gets ‘disintegrated’ and reassembled. In either case, the application can not survive on its own.
If the application is popularly successful - not just technically successful - then people start questioning about that application’s ability to ‘talk’ to other applications. This again is a result of users need to correlate seemingly related but physically distributed data and to get an enhanced perspective of the problem or solution. Hence the application evolves duly equipping itself with varied ‘communication skills’ on all directions - the most popular being north-bound interface.
On the other hand, if the application cannot evolve any more to communicate with other applications, due to inherent architectural pains or business reasons, it gets ‘diced’ or componentized so that some of the steam still left with the application in terms of legacy or complex components are taken out and either rebuilt in a different way or plugged into an entirely new application.