Tuesday, August 11, 2009

An Enterprise Technology Stack for Business Agility and Sustainably Low Cost

I have been musing about this for a few years now, but some recent discussions with colleagues caused my thinking to finally crystallise. I realise that the two enterprise IT objectives of delivering business agility and sustainably low cost are both realisable through a fairly simple, though disciplined, architectural approach. There is no real trade-off between flexibility and cost-effectiveness, although hard choices need to be made and problematic technologies need to be fearlessly called out.

I've attempted to build this logic out into an argument in this presentation. I'm sure there will be many who will object vigorously to various aspects of this argument, but I'm confident that this logic will appear obvious in hindsight within a decade.

For those who don't have the patience to go through the entire presentation, the final technology stack is illustrated below.