Michael Blechar

As I begin my end of year vacation time, I would like to reflect briefly on trends in the research areas I cover. As with business overall, we saw organizations focusing on cost cutting and containment through most of the year, but with a consistent investment in the disciplines of service oriented architecture (SOA) and development of applications (SODA), application architecture and service design, business process management (BPM), master data management (MDM) and enterprise architecture (EA). I also saw with renewed interest and focus on metadata management and governance disciplines and technologies. In addition, I received increasing numbers of inquiries related to how IT could best collaborate with the business units, and how the enterprise, technology, data, application and business architects and analysts – and their methodologies and technologies – could be used in collaborative ways.

Those familiar with this blog will realize that I strongly recommend that organizations have coordinated SOA/SODA, BPM and MDM initiatives all using a complementary set of services-oriented set of methods – otherwise the scope of reusable services will be limited or inconsistent. Moreover, while there are benefits (like transparency, interoperability and standardization) to implementing a SOA, I;d rather see organizations not try to design good reusable business software and data services for SODA without two key ingredients: 1)the business analysis must be done using a cross-organizational end to end shared process design mentality and 2)you need a skilled application architect/analyst who can convert these cross-organizational and cross-process set of requirements into the right level of granularity of software and data services as part of a transition strategy of the current application architecture to its place in the future solution architecture.

And, of course, the data architecture needs to move forward in a similar way with MDM in areas like CRM, ERP and SCM driving the changes needed to move to the next generation of data services and metadata management. As application vendors, consulting companies and Cloud service providers begin to deliver increasing amounts of service-oriented content we should see SOA/SODA penetrate even deeper into mainstream and laggard organizations over the next 3-5 years, with increasing “development” of application solutions by those in the business units and others involved in new forms of social computing.

The good news from 2009 from my perspective is that I believe that organizations are starting to “get it”. I am seeing clear movement forward on an evolutionary basis in all these areas. In other words 2009 was a solid year for moving towards a collaborative environment where service-orientation helps the business units break down the silos between their applications to promote agile and consistent end to end processing, IT and the business units to deal better with each other, and the internal silos of IT blurring to have architects and analysts work in more collaborative and productive ways.

As 2010 rolls in, I think you will see some organizations identify new business and IT investment opportunities to leapfrog into the lead in their markets, and others responding to that change of reality by spending more money as well. Hopefully, this will lead to a much more prosperous (albeit challenging) year ahead.

And so, my friends, I leave you on that positive note and wish you and your families, friends and loved ones “Happy Holidays” and hope that you each have a healthy, wealthy and wise New Year!

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