Monday, December 11, 2006
Enterprise Architecture: More Predictions for 2007
Here are some additional predictions:
- Web 2.0: This will start to appear on the radar of enterprise architecture teams but only to provide another way of integrating disparate IT systems. They will however realize that their corporate web site is lame and start to noodle how to engage their customers, partners and shareholders using web 2.0
- Outsourcing: Several large enterprises will realize that Outsourcing to India didn't provide the cost savings they anticipated and will bring IT back inhouse to increase agility. Others will still pursue outsourcing but avoid India like the plaque and instead pursue less untapped destinations such as Brazil, Jamaica, Trinidad, Philippines and China
- Leadership: Enterprises will finally figure out the fact that there is a distinction between management and leadership. They will also start spending significant dollars on training their IT employees to become leaders.
- Blogging: Half of corporate America will be frightened by their employees blogging and will take pre-emptive strikes on them by blocking at the firewall and creating hostile employee policies. The other half of corporate America will do the exact opposite and realize the value to the enterprise by allowing its employees to have open conversations
- Smalltalk: Enterprises will embrace Smalltalk but only in its open source form eschewing closed source commercial implementations which will continue to lose marketshare. Microsoft will start discussions in the blogosphere on the merits of Smalltalk.NET
- Enterprise Architecture: The focus will rapidly shift away from cost cutting towards growth enablement. As the stock market rises, it will create the needed capital to do things correctly. The enterprises that gain competitive advantage will do so with the right mix of strong technical leadership, innovation and a focus on the human aspects of technology
- Security: in 2007, industry analysts who provide coverage on SOA, BPM, ESB, Portals and CRM will start including research into the products which provide the most secure implementation. Analysis may include coverage of the vendors secure software development practices, which industry standards in the security space they implement and even the results of security vulnerability scans using automated tools. Likewise, vendors will realize that security may be the next killer application and will be marketing it as such
- Enterprisey: While several of my coworkers already blog, in 2007 90% of my peers will have a publicly accessible blog making my employer wins accolades from many industry magazines as being one of the few Fortune 100 enterprises who openly contribute back to the community in a variety of ways
