The Year of Consumerization of Lean Enterprise Software
7. The Year of Consumerization of Enterprise Software
Enterprise software has often been very successful “shelf-ware”, being expensive, difficult to rollout, expensive to scale and difficult for users to learn and want to use. The consumer market and Web 2.0 has shown the way in a number of areas including:
- Simple and intuitive to learn with no training course
- A system that users want to use as opposed to being forced to use
- Low-cost, massive scalability
A study for CIO magazine entitled “Nine out of 10 users said they could work better if they could bring their home computer into work,” points to users finding the web and web 2.0 applications easier to use and more productive than legacy enterprise applications. The iPhone, Facebook, LinkedIn, Digg, Twitter, Google, WordPress, delicious, Slideshare and Friendfeed will influence enterprise software and expectations as much as they have the internet. Enterprise software will become consumerized, changing the trend of enterprise software funding the consumer market irreversibly. In the 1980s and 1990s enterprises and the military set the pace for technology innovation. Consumer technologies are now increasingly driving technology innovation and IT adoption.
The Consumerization of Enterprise Software
Prediction for 2009: ECM software will become consumerized and as much at home in the home office as the head office. Just like you don’t say software is object-oriented you won’t say software is Web 2.0. It will just be there, inside and outside the enterprise. Interfaces will move to Rich Internet Interfaces such as AJAX, Flex and standards such as RSS, REST, RSS, ATOM, JSON, OpenSearch will become as taken for granted as http and HTML.
8. The Year of the Lean Software – The Development Diet
Every new year has “New Year’s Resolutions” and a diet is often on the list. This year the diet will be in software development. The 1990’s was to software, what junk food is to a weight-loss plan. Bloatware and obesity went hand-in-hand. This century has seen core technology such as Java remain at the server level but lightweight scripting and rapid development become the norm for application development and the antidote to bloated vendors, products and applications. Lightweight development focuses on:
- Simplicity and rapid development
- Lightweight scripting using such as PHP, JavaScript, Ruby, Perl and Python vs. J2EE and .NET
- REST vs. SOAP
- Web scalable vs. Enterprise scalable
- Mashing up internal and external content vs. content from one system
Prediction for 2009: Loosely-coupled scale-out, REST architectures will form the foundation of new systems with web applications developed in lightweight scripting languages delivering mashed-up content into a RIA will be the way forwards in 2009.
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Tags: alfresco, consumerization, Content Management, enterprise, lean software, Open Source, REST
