Too often cut off from direct accountability and saddled with a long backlog of user demands, IT departments frequently have little incentive or ability to be responsive to the business. And like personal computing did to the previous generation of computing, this will drive businesses to solve their own problems using simple, inexpensive alternatives. Yes, folks, I'm talking about Software as a Service (SaaS).
Barely a year old as a term, the Ajax browser programming technique has received a lot of press and industry attention in the last few months. Not the least because head-turning software is being developed with it. Ajax sparking yet another big push towards Software as a Service on the Web and even the biggest software players like Microsoft are making significant investments in Ajax desktops, online business software, as well as elaborate Ajax development frameworks such as Microsoft's forthcoming Atlas product.
While the concept of IT commandments sounds rigid and inflexible to me, I will admit there are some core truths that should almost never be violated. Fellow ZDNetter Paul Murphy has recently blazed this trail and it's an interesting experiment in seeing what people believe is fundamentallly important in IT if nothing else, and spark useful debates. IT commandments will be part of a ZDNet blog series over the next week or so.
I recently had the pleasure of watching Nick Garr give his take on something he describes as Web-Oriented Architecture or WOA. There are a lot of ways to view Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) and this particular lightweight vision of SOA is well worth watching. This is because WOA is more of an emerging best practice from the battle-hardened folks in the field than it is from ivory tower architects or the analyst group notebook, which always lends an idea more credence in my book.
I read with interest the recent CNet interview with SAP CEO Henning Kagermann where he was asked more questions about on-demand software and social software than not. Kagermann isn't overly impressed with the on-demand model and crisply defends what SAP, one of the largest software companies in the world, is doing with their hybrid model. He makes the point that their customers run their core businesses on SAP and would be out of business if their SAP implementation goes down.
Easy software assembly out of pre-existing pieces has been a holy grail of software development for decades. Along these lights, many of us have been tracking the mashup phenomenon and the associated innovation including the bustling mashup ecosystem that has been one of the big stories of the last year so. You can see the results yourself by visiting the terrific MashupFeed directory of current mashups, or just the raw material by looking at all the reusable Web services listed on Programmable Web.
The emergence of new social networking services such as Pinterest and a growing base of disgruntled 3rd party developers for the leading services shows that changes in the social networking industry are far from over. It's also causing a rethinking of the business models and partner ecosystems of what's become the old guard, Facebook and Twitter.