Software, apps, are still built the same way as they started out in the good old days of single-batch-processing. Having information and logic inseparable. Spend a day with PowerPoint and see that .ppt file be useless for all other programs. Want US GAAP applied to your P&L, have some accountants sweat over the UK GAAP manipulated figures for months.
Good for the armies of IT consultants and many a 'middleware' supplier, bad for the user. IBM says that "40% of everything enterprise customers spend on IT goes for just making the stuff work together".
And, according to an article by Larry Dignan:
General Motors has cut its mission-critical applications from 7,000 in 1996 to just over 3,000 today. Hewlett-Packard intends to slash its enterprise resource planning systems from 21 to four. HP reckons it can cut total applications from 3,500 to 1,500.
3,000 mission-critical applications, guess who thrives on this situation, the user? Nah.
Take 40 different apps and make them work together with nifty-state-of-the-art middleware and you get 780 relationships and nice billing opportunities for the glue-gun army. Let your CFO replace his accounting system, and the glue-gun chaps smiles again...
Why not split logic and information? Why not keep the information in raw form and manipulate when needed and never keep manipulated data? Then the 40 apps would equal 40 independent relationships. Guess what would happen to the other numbers above... and while you're at it, guess what the glue-gun army would say...
Alas, it would require a new kind of software thinking, a new breed of software...
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