Dion Hinchcliffe has an interesting article over at ZDNet where he outlines 8 Enterprise predictions for 2009. I think It's a decent article and worth a read but I did take issue with a few of his points.
Below I try to elaborate on those points.
1. Tight budgets will drive the adoption of low-cost Web 2.0 and cloud/SaaS solutions. This seems like an obvious prediction but how it plays out will be very interesting. This could end up actually helping the smaller Enterprise Web 2.0 players as companies look to get away from the big-ticket, enterprise-class offerings from major vendors like IBM, Oracle, and others.
To me this shows a misunderstanding of Enterprise level IT planning. Rule #1 of Corporate IT is "low price does not equal low total cost." The cheap alternatives that he speaks of are generally lacking a comprehensive support structure. This means repairing the simplest little problem requires a lot of effort. Much more than say calling Microsoft and paying $245 to have a low level employee sit on the phone with one of their engineers and fix the problem.
6. Mobile platforms and devices will become highly strategic in 2009. The spread of Android beyond phones to computing appliances, major advances in the iPhone platform, the prevalence of the Blackberry and its new open application strategy, the growth of the netbook will drive business applications that continue to untether the workforce, enable virtual organization while connecting workers together using new collaboration and communication technologies, many of which will be using 2.0 approaches. If the desktop didn’t completely die in 2008, it will become almost completely outmoded in 2009 as the average smartphone becomes capable of helping users with a larger percentage of their daily computing and communication tasks.
I doubt this. Again, this highlights the difference between how things are done in a corporate environment and how things are done is say...a startup. Corporate customers look to test and refine new devices before deploying them. All that testing and refinement costs money and as Mr. Hinchcliffe points out money is in short supply this year. If anything I expect many devices that would have been big successes this year to stall out because shrinking budgets don't give IT departments the resources to do their normal due diligence.
7. SOA goes on a diet, picks up some new tricks, and survives. I’ve long been bullish on the ideas of SOA, but very concerned that the focus is on complicated technology, hard to master skills, and too much the purview of technologists and not business people. To be fair, some of the fault squarely lies with workers that don’t take the time to master the basics of modern technology’s application to business in today’s global, highly competitive environment. They don’t have the knowledge to design a modern, working business.
This is the hardest point to critique because, while he's totally wrong, I really wish he was right.
The reality that I've found is that communication between organizations, such as with SOA based supply chains, comes from the top down. What I mean by that is small organizations have to adopt what is dictated to them by larger organizations who themselves are dealing with even larger corporations. When you get to the top of this food chain you have companies that are buying very expensive solutions from IT providers like IBM, Microsoft et al. Those IT Providers have all been recommending complex SOAP based solutions for years.
To give you some idea how backwards this process can be I'm currently dealing with the County of Los Angeles which is planning to implement a brand new system this year that uses...wait for it...Manual Uploading of EDI documents (If you don't know what those are look it up, you'll be shocked).
Those are the predictions I had specific problems with. His other predictions fall into the category of what I'd call "possible but unlikely." I say that because the others tend to fall into enabling more communication between workers and I've found that most corporations are tending to back away from computer based communication solutions. The problem with these solutions is that they ignore the fact that most people have a desire to make personal connections with those they work with. So most collaboration is done on a personal level through one-to-one communication like meetings, phone calls or IM.
Web 2.0 type technology is good at bringing large groups of unrelated people together and harnessing their collective intelligence. But in an environment where there's already an existing social connection between the people (such as a company) I've found the technology tends to fall flat. Making them an unused waste of money.
Anyway, an interesting article none the less.