Ideas on Enterprise Information Systems Development

This blog is devoted to ideas on Enterprise Information Systems (EIS) development. It focuses on Lean Thinking, Agile Methods, and Free/Open Source Software, as means of improving EIS development and evolution, under a more practical than academical view. You may find here a lot of "thinking aloud" material, sometimes without scientific treatment... don't worry, this is a blog!
Every post is marked with at least one of Product or Process labels, meaning that they are related to execution techniques (programming and testing) or management techniques (planning and monitoring), respectively.

Sunday, September 12, 2010

Why Agile for EIS? - Part III

There is an "ultimate" argument for Agile for EIS: need for speed.

Although this is not mainstream yet, more and more EIS are becoming in reality systems of systems. People talk about Enterprise Mashups and Dynamic Process Integration. During a dinner in Confenis 2010 some of us were discussing about the huge amount of disparate data sources and business processes that must be integrated to achieve better enterprise management, better decisions, and better understanding of customer expectations - in other words, to attain and keep competitive advantage. And new sources appear almost every day.

Although  there is a lot of work on automating and reducing the effort for the integration of business processes and data sources, I personally believe that programmers will still have a key role in all this. And for us to give quick response to these new integration needs ("which appear almost every day"), we cannot count on heavy and slow project management processes. Moreover, we cannot count on filling forms to guarantee software quality, simply because forms are not software, and there is no guarantee that the form is telling the truth.

Enter Agile...

Ps.: there is one Agile technique that I am not convinced yet of its applicability in EIS: Open Scope Contracts. I believe that is too hard for most law departments, in special in big companies and government, to accept this. In fact my team faced this problem when we tried to use OSC in an small ERP project for a foreign government some time ago.

No comments:

Post a Comment