Hello World!

As the famous saying goes "Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future". However, it seems obvious that the era of the PC as the principal engine of growth for the IT industry is drawing to a close. In the nineteenth century there was a shift from people owning one general purpose electric motor with various specialised attachments to people owning many motors each embedded in a single use device. A similar thing seems to be occurring now. Computers are becoming both less obviously computers and also more ubiquitous, location-aware and permanently connected. I recently replaced by wife's ailing MacBook with an iPad. For her, as for many others, it's probably all the computer she'll ever really need. Ironically, she doesn't even regard it as being a computer. She's scared of computers. Mostly she's scared that if she does something "wrong" she'll "break" it. Not so with the iPad. As the PC is supplanted by the Really Personal Computer (e.g. tablet, app-phone) much of the burden of computation and storage is shifting from the user's own device into the cloud. And what a cloud. Incredibly rich and diverse services are available for free (well, seemingly free). Many enable their users to maintain and develop networks of friends, relatives and business contacts. Others enable their users to manage their day-to-day lives more easily, listen to virtually any music ever recorded or simply share their family photos and videos.

The world of cloud services is rich and user-focussed. The world of corporate IT is the polar opposite. Most IT departments spend their time patching old systems in order to coax them into continuing to function or bending them violently in unnatural ways in order to meet new business requirements which are far distant from those originally intended by the system's original developers. The vast majority of code written by developers isn't anything to do with business process. Instead developers spend most of their time worrying about the infrastructural context in which their code will run. If the highest abstraction always wins then why are we still engaged in hand-to-hand combat instead of undertaking surgical strikes with the IT-equivalent of laser-guided bombs? Users (rightly) expect better. After all, at home, they can get exactly what they want. At the office - not so much.

Corporate IT is broken and the users have noticed. There must be something we can do about this. The ongoing purpose of this blog is to explore the architectural shifts occurring in the IT industry and try to suggest ways in which these changes can be exploited to help mend corporate IT.