March 24, 2008 • Volume 6 • Number 3
Complete Application Agility
“What I see most important is complete application agility,” explains Andrew Gordon, Director, Open Source Solutions, Federal Systems, Unisys Corporation.
Gordon defines this by saying that open systems used to be considered as a way to become more agile but that system underneath had to change. “Open systems had standards based APIs so that if the system underneath was proprietary you could still be in a situation of vendor lock in,” says Gordon.
“Complete application agility would be defined as a combination of open systems, open data formats and unrestricted access to the source. It is systems built to a set of open standards including open source and open data formats. And it really needs to focus on open business models.”
According to Gordon, open architecture and open business models and complete agility give you control over your investment. And what’s important is that it really encourages industry to compete in ideas and execution, not product lock in. And this really then strengthens the industrial base by not protecting industry from competition.
“So what’s important again is you lose control if you allow a single proprietary element to compromise the sustainability and the leveragability of an IT system,” says Gordon. “It could be software, it could be a technique to embed proprietary data in an otherwise open data format or as in one recent case, an agency was denied access to the design artifacts for a well known federal IT system we all use, because they were deemed proprietary.”
Complete applications agility allows the IT provider to be in the best position because it is impossible to know when the next great technology or solution will emerge or how customers’ requirements might change at a moment’s notice.
“What’s really going to leapfrog open source applications running on the desktop,” says Gordon. “This is going to happen in the next couple of years with web based collaboration and enterprise messaging. This is better known as Web 2.0. And these tools include wikis, blogs, reach internet apps, enterprise content, management and instant messaging, and web based office software.”
Gordon says there have been several successes. One is the reference architecture documents put out by OMB was also developed on a wiki and with that document, with the output from that, the reference architecture document, there was absolutely no review process.
“So if you think about the process steps that were saved because of online collaboration,” notes Gordon, “what you are really going to see in the next 2 to 5 years is dramatic productivity increases, complete elimination of process steps, and really workplace communication in federal will be really radically transformed."
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