IT Nirvana

Over the last few posts I have raised the unfulfilled concept that was prevalent in the early days of Open Systems - namely the Corporate or Enterprise Database. This concept was where corporate data would be stored and accessed centrally from a central managed place. Of course the central database never happened and there are lots of reasons for this, but I like to think of the Corporate Database as a kind of IT Nirvana. Twenty years ago if we could show IT managers what their systems landscapes would look like today I think this idea may have taken off and just possibly we could have a achieved that blissful IT state.

Instead we face the following issues:

- Systems complexity - get your local IT architect to print out your current systems landscape. Even better get him to walk through all your interfaces.
- Data Warehouses - Often the holy grail of the data warehouse is the search for a single view of the truth. This is because your multiple systems will all have different versions. If the data was kept in one place then we wouldn't need to build expensive and complex data warehouses.
- Master Data Management - The Corporate Database is the MD solution
- Enterprise Data Bus - Why would we need a bus if all the data sits in the same location?

So are we likely to find spiritual enlightenment in IT soon? Well not so long as we can't see past the next quarter, or FY budget for that matter.

What goes around

Every wondered how over the last 20 years or so popular culture has begged, borrowed and stolen everything from the past fifty years or so. I think we're currently upto in 1983 in this playback. Goodness knows where we will go after we've revisited grunge because I don't think anything original has been created since then.

Strangely Enterprise IT has it's cycles to:

Centralised IT - Mainframe and green screen dumb terminal
Client Server IT - Midrange UNIX boxes and desktop PC's. Custom built GUI Applications.
Distributed IT - n-Tier applications, middleware, web and application servers and browser delivered applications.

The problem with this model is that every time we've added something we've also taken away.

Green screens were great for data entry but try viewing a BI dashboard on one. GUI Apps were much prettier than browser apps but required all those installation and network overheads. Browsers are great for distribution and access from anywhere but often have a woeful user interface.

I've been waiting for the last 10 years for the next cycle to arrive. One candidate was the advent of Rich Internet Applications like Ajax, Flash or Curl but frankly I'm still waiting for these to arrive in Enterprise IT.

If the iPad get's picked up for the Enterprise them maybe all that will change and well start to see Apps being developed that are user friendly yet easy on the infrastructure. Isn't that a little bit like a return to the Client Server model.