Building on experience....IT is growing up

July 2002

At a recent government computing conference in the UK one of the speakers explained how his service - a heavy user of Information Technology not unconnected with law enforcement - was adopting a radically new approach to the procurement of business systems. In the 1980's (he said) they had gone for large-scale bespoke systems, this had not been entirely successful; in the 1990's they went for 'best of breed packages' and integrated them, also a qualified success. Learning from these experiences the new approach was a component-based strategy based on Foundations ^TM of good database design.

A welcome outbreak of common sense and a sign of the growing maturity in the IT user community. The IT industry, on the other hand, is still dominated by large, product based, companies whose natural instinct is to create demand by hyping new ideas, build applications before talking to mere users and then sell licenses to cover the cost of sales and R&D. Most of these have grown up in the 1990's where buying an off the shelf package, 'best of breed' of course, was what a prudent middle manager did. Meanwhile the armies of contractors who spent the 1980's happily reinventing the wheel within large monolithic bespoke developments found new pastures in the fertile valley of product customisation and integration.

But times change and the conclusions reached by our speaker reflect the realities of a maturing industry which at it's core is governed more by the realities of good engineering practice than the get rich quick fantasies of the financial markets. The truth is that both the bespoke approach and the best of breed approach have their merits, a good way to understand this is to look at another branch of engineering with a rather longer history.

When an architect sets out to design a new building they start with a clean sheet of paper and many generations of accumulated expertise. They can draw on a huge resource of existing designs and much of the functional detail of the building such as plumbing, heating systems, wiring and so on can be taken for granted. Similarly standard components such as steel frames, bricks, windows and staircases are all manufactured to known standards and are designed to be mutually compatible.

Architects don't have to invent double-glazing in order to design light, well insulated buildings. Similarly they do not have to constrain the layout of an office because all of the available windows come with their own rooms attached. My point is that in the world of civil engineering we have a well established mix of components, predefined products and bespoke design which when combined with the right mix of professional expertise can be relied upon to produce pretty much any building we want.

What the component based approach to IT systems does more than anything else is separate the Foundations^TM from the furniture. This is something that neither the wholly bespoke or the best of breed approach succeed in doing and that, in the long term, is why they both fail to deliver the kind of continuous improvement that business needs to compete effectively. In this case the Foundations^TM are the data whilst the furniture is the detail of a particular screen or function. And the problem is easy to understand if we go back to our building analogy. In the totally bespoke world we assume that we can specify everything about the building we want before we start and that nothing about it will change for the foreseeable future. The result of this is an overly bureaucratic design process which seeks to guarantee that the building we get next year is the one we thought we wanted two years ago, and not only will the internal walls be made of reinforced concrete but the desks will be welded to the steel frame.

Our best of breed building on the other hand is delivered part built with beautiful bathroom furniture and tasteful matching carpets and curtains. The problem is that you end up building a different building for each department and none of your existing furniture will fit in any of them. Worse still they all come with a contract which invalidates your warranty if you reorganise the roles of the staff working in the building.

What the component based approach does is allow you to separate the permanent aspects of your system from the arrangement of the furniture, so that yesterdays work flow project can evolve into tomorrows Customer Relationship Management programme without anyone losing track of your customers' phone number

While a component based approach to building business systems is eminently sensible in theory, it does require skilled architects. Big players in the industry are gearing up to repackage much of their existing product as components or 'web services' and will still be desperate to extract value from their current systems and methods. The real key to this step in the development of IT is the emphasis on standards rather than products and on solid Foundations^TM rather than fashionable curtains.