A Business View Regarding the Selection of Agent Development Toolkits
Steven H. Schoepke · 2003
In today’s rapidly changing application development arena, it’s becoming increasingly clear that a strong alignment between the academic, development, and commercial environments is required in order to be competitive. The lag time between conception and deployment of a software tool is narrowing as each day passes. New offerings seem to spur new demands, which ultimately places a greater emphasis on the requirement for a common understanding between the environments. A basic understanding of each other’s needs and offerings can help to alleviate the stresses inherent in this evernarrowing window. This paper attempts to achieve this goal from a business’ point of view. Fannie Mae, the nation’s largest source of conventional mortgage funds, has stated a desire to develop internal experience specializing in the development and use of intelligent agent technology. The increasing volume and complexity of applications, network traffic, and architectures are compounded by the need for improved response time. Under these conditions, the act of maintaining traditional control mechanisms over remote processes seems to be untenable and costly. Hence, the offloading and distributing of this control in the form of intelligent agents seems to be a natural and progressive step. This move will hopefully enhance the efficient management of the company’s business processes. Specifically, agent technology could be offered as a shared service to the business units that request it, and development/consulting services will be provided accordingly. An ultimate goal of the company would be to optimize the construction and delivery process of intelligent agents, which will require the use of robust and well-supported toolkits. Fannie Mae views the term toolkit as something that comprises more than what is immediately visible. The following tangible and intangible factors that will be considered should be viewed as goals, not as absolutes. The content of this paper is aimed at both the academic and vendor populations, for purposes of attaining a mutual understanding.