The SI is dead. Long live the Supplier Integrator
Have we reached peak SI is a splendid post by Peter Evans Greenwood about the changing IT world. On one side of the boxing ring there is the traditional system integrator, on the other side there is a multitude of change agents: Business taking back budget for IT spend from local IT On-demand and on-time [...]
Comments make your code alive. Otherwise, it’s dead
I had a small discussion about code and comments with Bob MacNeal. Bob thinks that Commented out code is the same as a comment – Litter. Don’t litter. I strongly disagree, although we had a nice conversation. It turned out that @MartijnLinssen I’m an average coder at best, but I like clean code. I’ve made [...]
The apprentice- master model
Jon Reed made the following statement on Twitter: Marin accused Deloitte of using project as “a trial-and-error training ground” for junior consultants. Panelists: please react #focuserprt My answer: very common Growth. How do you grow people from skill A to skill B? The eternal question. For we are struggling with that question in our personal [...]
The packages – customisation MQ
I got Rt’ed today on the #ITF11 hashtag: RT @MartijnLinssen: @johnrrymer @TomGrantForr There is no one-size-fits-all. Pure packages is wrong, as is pure customisation #ITF11 >YES and that’s basically all I have to say about it – not. There is a human tendency to do either-or. Black or white, good or bad, pretty or ugly [...]
How Google’s Android language architecture is dead wrong
I love my HTC Desire. I held on to my Sony Ericsson P800 for 5 years, turning from an early adopter into a laggard, sending mobile text-only tweets via WAP up until the early Summer of 2010 – that started to feel awkward at some point. So in August I entered the “always on” world, [...]
Perfect Integration – the eBook
Perfect Integration by Martijn Linssen What started with Perfect Integration 1 – Architectural Approach and ended with Perfect Integration 13 – the do’s has become a lot of words, more than 10,000 actually. Hence my decision to publish it as an eBook for easier reading – if you have any comments or questions you [...]
The secret to success for Social Media? It’s 1.0
In the Search for Social as I call it, people have been mesmerising, stating and claiming success for the Social Movement in various ways. Email has been condemned to death as that wouldn’t be fit for the Brave New World, Facebook has been proclaimed the best way to interact with your users or customers, Twitter [...]
Perfect Integration 13 – the do’s
Final post in the series, this is the summary and conclusion, to be used as some sort of checklist if you like. When conducting enterprise business application integration, within the enterprise IT landscape among applications and systems, or from there to others at another company or even directed towards the customer, here are the pragmatic [...]
Perfect Integration 12 – the dont’s
I changed my mind and decided to end this series with positive do’s, so this is the dont’s one. Then again reserving no. 13 for the dont’s was a superstitious move anyway, and as I’m neither religious nor superstitious (they usually travel in pairs), it’s better this way. This post is about debunking TLA’s and [...]
Perfect Integration 11 – Orchestration
I’ve compared the diversity of an IT application landscape and managing its information exchange in a uniform way to translation, with the European Parliament as a perfect example of translating dozens of languages via three intermediate languages. In IT, we only need one, as languages (syntaxes) there are far less complex than in the linguistic [...]
Perfect Integration 10 – the missing link: envelope
With a common language, a common transport protocol, and the need to exercise the necessary translation and transformation on both levels in between, there is a growing need to be able to identify all “service requests” on a generic level too. Numerous and various requests will be made, in different formats, via different transport protocols. [...]
Perfect Integration 9 – history with hindsight
In the previous post, the history of Integration passed: point-to-point, EAI and ESB. For those who read and grasped post 1 through 7, it’ll be clear why I favour which one – but let me explain it in more detail. What are the differences between the different historical approaches? The crucial difference is that EAI [...]
Perfect Integration 7 – information exchange: transportation
After creating and or choosing a common or generic format to exchange the information, there is one other field to explore: the facilitation of various communication protocols through which this information can be transported. What applies to messages, also applies to transport: a common language is to be advised as “main artery” for all the [...]
Perfect Integration 6 – Common language: syntaxes
In the previous posts I explained semantics, syntax, and the fastest, cheapest and easiest way to get from diverse IT applications to one uniform business language. This post will take a deep dive into message formats such as Flat file, EDIFACT, XML and JSON. Ever wondered about the pros and cons of XML? JSON? What [...]
Perfect Integration 5 – Common language: indirect translation
Number 5 in the series, this post is about indirect translation, in contrast with the direct translation shown in the previous post, which came with costly, exponential dependencies. When looking towards large-scale use of translators, e.g. the European Committee in Brussels, it is easily observed how these dependencies can be greatly reduced: all languages are [...]
