"Architecture" Gets a Time-Out

Anne Thomas Manes published a great post about how the economic downturn means the end of big IT projects being done for some vaguely defined "value". There's a good podcast about it here.

I think the key messages are:

• IT can provide spectacular gains in business value only by transforming the IT department (people, processes and technology), not by changing the interface engine between the same set of disparate applications
• SOA is dead not because the technology is necessarily wrong, but because business aren't going to spend money on projects that don't provide immediate business value
• IT provides value by understanding the business and providing what the business needs. That's not a simple process and is fraught with political minefields within and outside the IT department
  

There's a great bit starting at minute 28:00 where she says, "Go take a look at the SOA success stories and invariably there's a new CIO in place. And it only happens because the CEO recognizes that he needs to fix IT, and he knows his current CIO isn't fixing it."