The Era of Knowledge …. Where did it go?

Remember at the turn of the century we were all convinced that the age of information was over and now we were entering the Era of Knowledge. It was supposedly the era where companies would start putting to use all the data they’d been collecting over the last decade. It was where technology could really start being leveraged, and all this data analyzed, to drastically improve business operations. What happened? Did we ever really get there? I’m not so sure we did.

Don’t get me wrong, effective use of technology in the enterprise has improved dramatically over the last decade. Nonetheless, it seems that most companies never really got out of the information era. They are stuck in a cycle of spending their budgets on maintaining and upgrading existing systems. By the time they get a system to point where it’s performing the necessary business functions, they realize it’s technically outdated and are either forced to start over with the latest technology or risk being left behind. There are a few key areas that companies need to analyze to start to solve this problem.

Companies need to learn to avoid “technology creep” which can happen over a period of years. The term scope creep is widely used to label the situation where a project’s requirements grow beyond the initial capacity of the project. At a coarser level, technology creep is the situation where the infiltration of different technologies into an enterprise grows past the enterprise’s ability to effectively support, maintain and integrate the technology. This tends to destabilize the enterprise, which hinders an organization’s ability to move ahead.

One of the primary factors that lead to technology creep is the lack of communication in an enterprise. Larger companies usually have an architecture group and individual business units to build the business applications. What tends to happen is that the business units are stuck on the fringe struggling to keep up with the needs of their business. Needless to say, the corporate strategy set forth by the enterprise is usually just noise and sometimes considered a hindrance by these business focused teams. Most of the time this is due to the business units being left out of enterprise decision making process when it comes to the technical strategy. An enterprise policy that facilitates communication across all technical groups and that takes into account existing technologies in the business, and individual business unit needs is paramount to stabilizing the enterprise.

Another factor leading to technology creep is incomplete or inconsistent standards set forth by the architects. All too often, when a development team is out designing a new project they may be mandated to use a specific technology, infrastructure or API, but the details are left to them to decide. Project templates for all levels of the application development including the GUI, Business Services, Persistence, Logging, Error Handling and other core application services can go a long way to standardize technology across the enterprise.

Enterprise services to maintain source control, build processes, development and test beds can go a long way to standardize the way applications are developed. Further inter-business unit design, and code reviews can go a long way to standardizing technology.Another important issue that is hindering the ability of companies to move forward is the lack of a comprehensive integration strategy. Unfortunately, this is an item that is all too often analyzed at the application level instead of the enterprise. Development teams are left thinking… “How am I going to make my system talk to system X to get the data I need”. They don’t usually think about an enterprise data integration strategy. A strategy that maps all the data in the systems across the enterprise as well as the flow of that data is crucial to improving the performance of the enterprise.

Summing it up, the efficiency of technology development has a lot to be improved. There is plenty of data being stored and processed in most enterprises, but the lack of communication, implementation standards, and integration strategy is hindering most organizations ability to get ahead and realize their full potential.