Fifty-five percent of businesses are under threat from digital disruption. An MIT CISR Research Report that landed in my inbox this morning reports that out of a sample of 105 senior executives that attended a recent workshop on digital business models, 55% assess their business as being in the "red zone"—significant...

Building distributed systems is our métier. One lesson we learned very early is the importance of visibility across all the elements in a system. But the more extended and loosely coupled your systems, the harder it is to achieve the visibility required. Loose coupling promotes availability and resilience but works...

A billion dollars used to be a lot of money. These days it can buy you a small social network, a sports team or perhaps a high profile IT project disaster. ComputerWorld's round-up of top IT disasters for 2013 leads with the Healthcare.gov debacle, but Australia proves its world-class chops with the Queensland Health...

IT goes through cycles—fat clients vs thin clients, centralised mainframes vs distributed computing. These tend to be areas where the costs and benefits of either end of the spectrum are difficult to discriminate between the alternatives. It takes time for the industry to settle on an equilibrium position, and quite...

There are many catchcries that have been misinterpreted through history. Donald Horne meant it as an indictment when he referred to Australia as the "Lucky Country". Anne Thomas Manes said "SOA is Dead" to refer to the demise of SOA as technology "silver bullet" that could be applied without thought or substantial...

Perhaps the number one problem in enterprise IT is 'change'—how to handle it and how to keep up with a changing world. Gartner says that "IT organizations' application strategies often aren't dynamic enough to handle changes in technology."

We spend a lot of time, effort and money building systems which (if we're...

There are two ways to look at integration:

Integration is a cost: poorly planned system procurement and development means that we carry the technical burden of multiple applications with overlapping concerns. Data must be replicated between systems in order for them to function. The mechanisms we use to perform this...

The IT debates continue - vehemently as ever - about which language, which architecture, which methodology and whether to use any methodology at all. Sometimes it feels like we're stuck in the veritable goldfish bowl admiring the shiny new castle that periodically presents itself. How could everyone be so right and so...