Enterprise applications architecture

My son Isaac takes two minutes to critique a mobile phone. My daughter Orla holds a dozen IM sessions in parallel while doing her nails, her homework and listening to music. And the youngest, Hope, gets frustrated as only a seven-year-old can, when she can’t install the game she’s bought because of poorly designed parental control filters that should affect web browsing and not CD-ROM installing.

They are the future. In fact, the way consumerisation’s moving, they are the present. Mobility and wireless, virtualisation and service orientation, Moore, Metcalfe and Gilder, the opensource gang, Jerry Garcia and Arctic Monkeys, and Steve Jobs. They help define the environment.

Some time ago I started working on a four-pillar model for enterprise architecture, in the belief that everything we do will be classified into one of the following:

Syndication: We will subscribe to stuff yanked out of humongous content publishers and consume them via a syndication, alert and aggregation facility. RSS gone ballistic. SAP and Oracle Financials meet Wall Street Journal Europe and Reuters. All stored somewhere both within the firewall as well as without. Text and voice and video.

Search: We will do some ad-hoc yanking ourselves, getting used to a Google-meets-StumbleUpon world where collaborative filtering of role and context helps relevance go up, and there are simple yet powerful heuristic tools because we can tag things and vote on them for future reference. Again from storage within and without.

Fulfilment: There’ll be a bunch of things where we need to discover what’s out there by syndication, search and learning. Refine what we discover to a set of things we’re interested in. Check out captive and brokered and otherwise made-accessible inventory. Discover price and select item. Provide shipping instructions or logistical information. Identify our right and authority to exchange value. Exchange that value via card or account or wampum. Be fulfilled. Flights, hotels, stocks, consultants, books, music, food. All fulfilled.

Conversation: Another bunch of things gluing all this together. Voice. Video. E-mail (though it will decay into pretend-snail-mail and die, I hope). Blogs and wikis. IM. Texting. Whatever. Ways of discovering, co-creating and enriching the value in information. Information that you need to fulfil things you have to do.

None of this will work if the information we need to get pushed to us or get pulled down by us is hidden behind walled gardens. Walls made of weird DRM constructs like Region codes on DVDs. Walls that hold our information and make it harder for us to rip it and mash it and make something useful out of it.

And DRM is a cater-cousin of identity and authentication and permissioning. All blessed by the grand panjandrums of information security, or escapees from the Y2K-marries-Basle-II-and-then-leaves-her-for-Sarbanes-Oxley-while-no-one’s-watching zoo.

But there’s good stuff too. NAND RAM may make our boot-up times easier. Consumer boradband wireless may well be reality soon, and the 20-year threat of telephony becoming software is finally happening. Opensource keeps redrawing the lines for the desktop and for core productivity tools. Apple goes Intel. It’s a good time.

I want to be able to come in to work. Get instant karma at my desk, with whatever passes for a desktop and whatever passes for a connect. Don’t care. Identify myself with whichever two factors are in vogue that day, provided they leave my cells intact and my privacy unflustered.

Then I take a look at what’s come in via my aggregator. Roll with it while I StumbleUpon the web. Stimulated by what I see in the aggregator or the web, I start pulling things down from the great data warehouse in the sky, preparing to create value by fulfilling something or the other. And all the time I’m talking to people and sharing metaphorical coffee and and and.

It’s happening now. So I think it’s time to keep elaborating on the four pillars, have them shot down and rebuilt as many times as possible. Egoless.

So this is what I’ll do in this part of the blog.

Talking about pillars. Christopher Wren designed the Guildhall where I live. 17th century wonderful support-free curved roof. They had town planners then. “Your edifice won’t stand up, you need more pillars in the middle”. “Says who? I’m the architect here”. “Says we, and you don’t get to build your beautiful building unless you do what we say. Four more pillars please”.

Dejected, he built them. In the central area. Just as they asked.

Six inches short.