David Sprott

The way we design business is undergoing profound transformation. For the past 100 years business design has been directly influenced by Frederick Taylor, focused on how we do work and how we can make it more efficient. The LEAN and Six Sigma movements are the visible manifestation of that thinking. Together with BPM they have focused on incremental improvements of primarily internal processes and tasks encoded in process orchestration and workflows that control how the enterprise works. But this is equivalent to looking in the rear view mirror to design tomorrows business. In this article we will look at three major trends that are going to break this conventional model. Smart behaviors enabling cross ecosystem processes Capability services (independent business components) enabling continuously evolving business models The convergence of consumer and business IT e... (more)

Reach for the Maturity Model NOT the Sky!

Last week Facebook announced its plans for IPO and it certainly made me stop and think, would I invest my money in a company that has a socialist manifesto epitomized by “the Hacker Way”. Sure lots of people will make a lot of money, particularly Mr Sugar Mountain, but is a company with 85% of its revenue based on ads worth a multiple of 20? Surely the world has grown up in the last decade and we won’t repeat the dot.com excesses? The smart money right now is on Facebook being a hugely successful business. But I see a number of things in Facebook that worry me. Although it’s a h... (more)

… so you should do a SOA Certification! But which one? And how?

After a near death experience SOA is alive and well. After mixed early learning experiences, most enterprises are seeing SOA in a fresh light. Just the other day one company was discussing with me their "SOA Reboot" project! They are in good company. I observe widespread activity that is based on doing SOA properly a second time around, including portfolio planning, shared services, good governance and not least education and certification of in-house practitioners and service providers’ personnel. There are several sources of SOA education and certification including ZapThink, ... (more)

Cyberwarfare – a real threat or an over reaction?

There’s been a flurry of resurgent interest in cyberwarfare in the last couple of months. It’s clearly a topic that we as citizens should take seriously, but there’s a strong temptation to dismiss it as science fiction. But as architects it is a topic we should perhaps take very seriously indeed. Like most people of my generation war has passed me by. It’s a matter for professional soldiers, not for the man in the street. But Cyberwarfare introduces a fundamental shift insofar as the war is more likely to be waged against a nation’s infrastructure, its banks, power and water uti... (more)

Application Overhaul

Get ready for a stream of well worn ideas given a makeover as Gartner delivers its annual conference. Notably: Application Overhaul. The new name for Application Modernization. According to Gartner “ . . . Application overhaul is a new take on legacy modernization methods that deal with the backlog of already-built applications – this overhaul is a task that must be successfully executed before IT can move out from the tremendous maintenance burden that saps budget from innovative projects.” For the last couple of years I and my colleagues have been advising that Application Mo... (more)