On the Radical De- and Re-Construction of Today’s Enterprise Applications
Dirk Draheim · Procedia Computer Science · 2019
The office applications (spreadsheets, text processing, presentation programs) used in today’s enterprises are silos. So are the ERP (enterprise resource planning) systems. Tons of time is wasted to manually pump around data between office applications, ERP systems and the many further enterprise applications (CRM, DMS, BI etc. etc.) [1,2]. The whole situation is fragile (error prone), blocks business process re-engineering [3, 4] and prohibits (potentially massive) enterprise data analytics. Enterprise content management systems [5] help a little but do not fundamentally improve the situation: they do not crack the silos. The same is with the many enterprise application integration approaches (ad-hoc glue code [6], SOA platforms [7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12], BPM suites [13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21]): nice-to-have, but no game changers. Enterprise wikis [22] could help somehow, but their potential is not well understood by today’s CIOs [1]; and again: they are silos. In this keynote, the presenter takes a different approach and fundamentally rethinks today’s enterprise application landscape. He explains the vision of a so-called massive backbone application (or system-2 application in terms of Stafford Beer’s Viable System Model [23, 24, 25]). He deconstructs today’s enterprise applications into their essential particles and recombines them coherently into the new approach: (i) collaborative editing of semi-structured data (wikis) [26], (ii) data types (data+operations) [27, 28], (iii) access rights mechanisms [29], (iv) version control [30, 31, 32], (v) expression-level transclusion [33, 34] of typed data [35] and (vi) an integrated querying language [35]. With such a backbone application, today’s enterprise applications become deeply standardized views (or perspectives) [36, 37] on a huge, single underlying information structure. Furthermore, (web) weaving [38, 39] of features becomes a first class citizen with such a backbone application. The presenter explains, how such a backbone application can radically improve the way we work.