Software Development is, these days, frequently about connections. Connections between different systems, applications, legacy systems and brand-new internet portals. You choice is yours to make. The days of small and standalone applications are numbered. The majority, again: as I believe, are small and accessible applications that combine data from different systems in order to create real information. This means, connecting the lines between the obvious and the, previously almost, obsolete.
Information rarely stands on it’s own these days. And it even isn’t always Business Intelligence anymore. When we are talking about adding value into new IT systems, most of the time it just means to create information using different sources of data. These sources even get a longer lifecycle because of these new connections.
When we are designing and developing connections between systems, or using different (maybe old) systems as the source of our information-cycle in a new application, we need to make sure we understand the meaning of the data we’re using. This meaning is easily translated when we take a look at the reason why we are using source systems. One of the largest reasons is that we don’t want data to occur twice (or more) in our complete application landscape.
Then why is it that, even applications that use data from different sources, data is stored even more in the past few years? Do we really need to interpret the data in so much way’s now? Or is it just a phase we are going trough?
In my eye’s, the real ‘application of the future’ doesn’t store any data itself anymore. It just acts like a conduit between applications and gives users just the information they need and let them interact in actions that are inter-applicational (is that a word? Hopefully you know what I mean). What are your thoughts on this? Is this possible?
