Business agility as a term
is often used to describe speed and efficiency, and is usually the driver for most investment in new IT development. Over the years
enterprises have been able to make significant improvements in streamlining business operations and leveraging information systems to
do so. This has now become almost ‘business as usual’ for IT, i.e. its very purpose has been to deliver business efficiency.
However, over the past
decade it is increasingly perceived that IT is just as often the bottleneck as well. Any business change today requires IT
applications to be enhanced, which often takes time and holds up business changes. In today’s economic climate, cost is just as
important also: Why do IT systems cost so much? Agile development methods have been proposed and explored as a possible way out of
this trap. But is process change all that is needed, or is a technology revolution required as well?
The term ‘Wed 2.0’ has
been used to describe the transformation of the internet from a world of publishers and readers to one of collaborators where
everyone is a creator of content. During this time we have also seen the success of some software as a service (SaaS) applications,
such as Salesforce.com, to the extent that application development is itself available as a hosted service, blurring the line between
users and developers, a trend we call Dev 2.0.
As an example we describe
TCS’ InstantApps platform, is a Dev 2.0 software development platform that combines model based architecture with software as a
service and delivers it within the enterprise data centre to bring Dev 2.0 from the public internet into corporate IT.
Even more recently, ‘cloud
computing’ has come to describe infrastructure as an internet service, such as Amazon’s EC2, Google’s App Engine, and Microsoft’s
Azure. The future will see a convergence of hosted Dev 2.0 platforms and cloud computing. What could the future enterprise IT
environment look like, when it is a mix of traditional systems, internet services as well as ‘behind the firewall’ Dev 2.0 platforms
running in internal enterprise clouds?
We close by outlining some
challenges for software engineering practice, education and research in the context of these technology trends.
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