Todd Biske: Outside the Box

The more I think about this, the more there is to say. Some more thoughts:

• To have success as a good service provider, you need to provide a good service.
• Services developed in Corporate IT are inherently more difficult than many Web 2.0 services because of the user-developer disconnect. In the case of Web 2.0, many services are consumer oriented. Guess what? Most developers are also consumers. In the corporate world, services are business oriented. Chances are, you don’t also play the role of the business user. Interestingly, however, we still are always moving in a direction of allowing the actual end user to build their own systems. Arguably, many tech-savvy users come up with new ways to utilize technology beyond what the IT department provides, whether it’s as simple as a good set of bookmarks in their browser, or some sophisticated use of scripting.

One last thought- I recently read An Introduction to Enterprise Architecture by Scott Bernard. One of the points he makes early in the book is that one element of enterprise architecture is social theory. Given this debate and my own experiences, I couldn’t agree more.