We regularly write about our technical experiences (good and bad) and what we're learning from the market.
Deloitte Platform Engineering has built experience and knowledge of delivering complex solutions that span organisational domains. These large scale, cross domain solutions bring added complexities to delivery. Our experience shows that by taking a different view to the problem you can deliver more than just a technology outcome.
Continue readingWe make companies feel young again by helping them move faster, to be more nimble and creative. Many factors go into “feeling young” and all of them lie in that nexus of forces that are changing the way business and technology work together. The scale and the breadth of change can be bewildering but a closer look reveals a common thread that runs throughout—autonomy.
Continue readingIs PaaS the secret sauce for the Composable Enterprise? Certainly Warner Music Group and their CTO Jonathan Murray have put a lot of effort into using CloudFoundry as the container for applications in their new enterprise. But I think PaaS is only one side of the coin.
Continue readingContinuing my series on the Composable Enterprise I’m looking at how different thought-leaders and organizations perceive the shift from our current methods of doing business to the digital platforms that will drive future, more agile businesses. This week I cover the “The Digital Enterprise Shift”, a whitepaper written last year by Neil Ward-Dutton, co-founder and Research Director at MWD Advisors and a prominent member of the enterprise architecture community.
Continue readingMy last post on the Composable Enterprise gave an overview of Jonathan Murray’s manifesto. While this is leading edge stuff, it is by no means new. We’ve been aiming for composable architectures for many decades now, going back to DCE and CORBA and perhaps even earlier. This speaks to how difficult the challenge is and how our approaches change with lessons learned from previous attempts.
Continue readingFifty-five percent of businesses are under threat from digital disruption. An MIT CISR Research Report that landed in my inbox this morning reports that out of a sample of 105 senior executives that attended a recent workshop on digital business models, 55% assess their business as being in the "red zone"—significant threat of digital disruption.
Continue readingA billion dollars used to be a lot of money. These days it can buy you a small social network, a sports team or perhaps a high profile IT project disaster. ComputerWorld's round-up of top IT disasters for 2013 leads with the Healthcare.gov debacle, but Australia proves its world-class chops with the Queensland Health payroll upgrade project; number two with an estimated cost of A$1.25 billion. These big project failures have many contributing causes and there are some good commission reports to learn from, but undoubtedly a major problem is their sheer size and scope.
Continue readingIT goes through cycles—fat clients vs thin clients, centralised mainframes vs distributed computing. These tend to be areas where the costs and benefits of either end of the spectrum are difficult to discriminate between the alternatives. It takes time for the industry to settle on an equilibrium position, and quite often technology change shifts the equilibrium before it is reached.
Continue readingPerhaps the number one problem in enterprise IT is 'change'—how to handle it and how to keep up with a changing world. Gartner says that "IT organizations' application strategies often aren't dynamic enough to handle changes in technology."
Continue readingThere are two ways to look at integration: Integration is a cost: poorly planned system procurement and development means that we carry the technical burden of multiple applications with overlapping concerns. Data must be replicated between systems in order for them to function. The mechanisms we use to perform this replication are decided by individual projects and as a result we have a hotch-potch of hundreds of interfaces, in different languages, using different tools, realtime, batch and manual re-keying. Or, Integration is an opportunity: no single application does what we need to run our organization. No application is an island, so it behoves us to make integration a core competency. By externalising data, processes and events, by making those capabilities addressable from the outside, we can develop and maintain a platform that allows us to build our unique organizational capability on top of our choice of commodity or best of breed applications.
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