Anne wrote a reasonable blog a while ago on why SOA was and wasn't dead but I'd like to go a bit further today and say that generally the concept of thinking appears to be dead. The value of 'thought' and thinking in IT has diminished, in a way that mirrors society at large, to the stage where design, planning, architecture and anything else other than just banging away at a keyboard appear to have been relegated behind opinions and statements as fact.
REST was a good example of this. It was going to be the revolution, it was going to be the way that everything worked. Two years ago I called bullshit on that revolution and I still say its bullshit and the reason is simple.
The same goes around with Hadoop and Big Data. The massive amount of information growth is complemented by an equally large amount of bullshit and a huge absence of critical thinking. What is the major barrier to things like Hadoop? "Its lack of real time ability" I hear people cry. Really? You don't think its that we have millions of people out there who think in a SQL Relational way and who are really going to struggle thinking in a non relational non-SQL type of way? You don't think that the major issue is actually in the acquisition and filtering of that information and the construction of the very complex analytics that are required to ensure that people don't go pattern matching in the chaos and find what they are looking for.
We are currently seeing a rush to technology in IT departments that is focused hugely on bells and whistles while the business continues to look at outcomes. With the business looking at SaaS, BYODand self-service applications the importance of thought and discussion in IT is acute. What I often see however is statements of 'fact' like 'you don't need integration its SaaS' or even worse a statement on a specific piece of API based technology as being important.
Planning, architecture and design are being seen in parts of IT as bad things as a mentality develops around a concept that some how basic fundamentals such as TDD, contract design and doing things that actually proven to work are in some way wrong. Adoption of unproven technologies is rife as is the surprise when those technologies fail to deliver on the massively over hyped expectation and indeed fail to even come close to delivering at the level of dull old technologies that do the job but don't currently have the twitterati in thrall.
'Experts' in this arena has come to mean 'people who shout loudly' in a similar manner to US politics. Facts, reason and worst of all experience are considered to be practically a disadvantage when being an expert in this environment. I was recently in formed that my opinion on a technology was 'tainted' as I'd used multiple other technologies that competed with it and therefore was 'biased against it'. I'd also used the technology in question and found that it was quite frankly rubbish. Sure the base coding stuff was ok but when I looked at the tooling, ecosystem and training available from those competitors I just couldn't recommend something that would actually work for the client. Experience and knowledge are not bias, thinking and being critical of new approaches is not a bad thing, thinking is not dirty.
When I look around IT I see that design is a disappearing skill and that the ability to critically assess technologies is being replaced by a shouty fanaticism that will ensure one thing and one thing only:
Thinking, design, planning, architecture and being skeptical on new technologies is the only hope for IT to remain relevant.
REST was a good example of this. It was going to be the revolution, it was going to be the way that everything worked. Two years ago I called bullshit on that revolution and I still say its bullshit and the reason is simple.
IT values technologies over thoughtSo people genuinely, and stupidly, think that how you shift packets from A to B will have a massive impact in how successful IT projects are at delivering their objectives. What impact has this had on the massive spend of ERP packages out there? Nothing at all. What has impacted that? Well folks like SFDC because they've shifted the business proposition and in so doing have moved the way business people think about IT systems.
The same goes around with Hadoop and Big Data. The massive amount of information growth is complemented by an equally large amount of bullshit and a huge absence of critical thinking. What is the major barrier to things like Hadoop? "Its lack of real time ability" I hear people cry. Really? You don't think its that we have millions of people out there who think in a SQL Relational way and who are really going to struggle thinking in a non relational non-SQL type of way? You don't think that the major issue is actually in the acquisition and filtering of that information and the construction of the very complex analytics that are required to ensure that people don't go pattern matching in the chaos and find what they are looking for.
We are currently seeing a rush to technology in IT departments that is focused hugely on bells and whistles while the business continues to look at outcomes. With the business looking at SaaS, BYODand self-service applications the importance of thought and discussion in IT is acute. What I often see however is statements of 'fact' like 'you don't need integration its SaaS' or even worse a statement on a specific piece of API based technology as being important.
Planning, architecture and design are being seen in parts of IT as bad things as a mentality develops around a concept that some how basic fundamentals such as TDD, contract design and doing things that actually proven to work are in some way wrong. Adoption of unproven technologies is rife as is the surprise when those technologies fail to deliver on the massively over hyped expectation and indeed fail to even come close to delivering at the level of dull old technologies that do the job but don't currently have the twitterati in thrall.
'Experts' in this arena has come to mean 'people who shout loudly' in a similar manner to US politics. Facts, reason and worst of all experience are considered to be practically a disadvantage when being an expert in this environment. I was recently in formed that my opinion on a technology was 'tainted' as I'd used multiple other technologies that competed with it and therefore was 'biased against it'. I'd also used the technology in question and found that it was quite frankly rubbish. Sure the base coding stuff was ok but when I looked at the tooling, ecosystem and training available from those competitors I just couldn't recommend something that would actually work for the client. Experience and knowledge are not bias, thinking and being critical of new approaches is not a bad thing, thinking is not dirty.
When I look around IT I see that design is a disappearing skill and that the ability to critically assess technologies is being replaced by a shouty fanaticism that will ensure one thing and one thing only:
IT will no longer be left to IT folksThe focus of shiny technology over business outcomes and the focus of short term coding over long term design will ensure that IT departments get broken up and business folks treat IT as a commodity in an ever growing way.
Thinking, design, planning, architecture and being skeptical on new technologies is the only hope for IT to remain relevant.
