Back to VSLive! San Francisco Show Daily Home

	email article
	printer friendly

IT Trends and Industrial Evolution
Microsoft's Pat Helland compares current IT operations to past processes and human behavior patterns.
by Ken McNamee

VSLive! San Francisco, March 26, 2004

Watch a 15-minute video clip of the keynote!

Pat Helland Architect, .NET Enterprise Architecture Team

What do software, the Internet, and communication standards have to do with railroads, Eli Whitney, and cardboard? More than you might initially think. In his keynote address at VSLive! on Thursday, Pat Helland, an architect on Microsoft's .NET Enterprise Architecture Team, described in fascinating detail how the creation, distribution, and interoperation of software architectures is not a new development in human history. Helland proposed that the way in which information technology shops operate internally and externally is simply a rerun of human behavior patterns that date back to the early 1800s.

Up until the early 19^th century, products weren't made by a machine, but by hand—the original meaning of the word "manufactured." They were also made one at a time and made locally for local use. It was expensive and not altogether reliable to ship a product from one city to another. The end result was that various communities had little to no interaction with other communities. If you shipped a product from one town to another, you had to package it so that it would survive the trip unscathed and arrive at its destination in its original condition. Because the roads were so bad and designed for moving people instead of cargo, the factories were usually adjacent to canals and rivers.

Helland likened the state of information technology to the slow emergence from the pre-industrial world. Software and data are analogous to 19^th-century products. IT shops and companies are like communities with their own cultures and standards. Companies often find it difficult to communicate data to other companies. Typically, the data is specially packaged by the sender and then unpackaged on the other end. The two companies must agree on the packaging or use a standard packaging.

In the late 1800s, cardboard was invented and soon became the standard packaging material all companies used to ship their products. The cardboard package was affixed with a label describing the sender and receiver addresses, and sometimes even a description of the contents inside. Labels such as "Fragile" or "This Side Up" became the norm to communicate special properties of the package or contents. If this is beginning to sound like XML and SOAP, then you're paying attention. Helland said that XML-based standards are emerging as the digital cardboard of the 21^st century. It is merely a way to package data in a self-describing manner and move it from one location to another without losing anything along the way.

Where Are We Now?
According to Helland, the current state of IT is equivalent to the year 1880 in terms of industrial business models. We are still building and agreeing on the infrastructure for moving and packaging data, and deciding what roles the different organizations play. We are moving toward an IT world where services, standards, and components become increasingly important. People used to have clothes custom-made and tailored. They fit perfectly but were expensive to buy. Now we buy standard, pre-manufactured clothing that might be slightly too big or too small but is incredibly cheap by comparison. Relative to the custom-tailored clothing, modern clothing is much cheaper because the materials and sizes have been standardized, and the machinery that makes the clothes has been standardized and is probably reused to make various types of clothing.

Components and standards are somewhat analogous to imperfect-fitting, yet inexpensive clothing. As a software developer, you could create your own UI component that does exactly what you need, but it might cost you $10,000 in salary-equivalent time to do it. Or you could buy a component from another company that does 90 percent of what you need for $150. So you must decide whether that other 10 percent is really worth $9,850. In terms of standards, you could create your own communication format or protocol for another company to gain access to your data that is more efficient in size and speed than XML or SOAP. However, if each company did this, the time and expense required to hook different systems together would probably far outweigh the technological benefits.

Until recently most companies custom-tailored their data and communication protocols when moving the data from one system to another. Many companies still do this, but that's changing now. According to Helland, the same sociological and economic forces that drove 19^th century businesses and people toward better communication (railroads), componentization (Eli Whitney's interchangeable parts), and standardization (cardboard) are still at work in the current IT world. Today, many companies exist only to provide specialized services and components that other companies use to build their own products or even provide their own services. Other companies provide the network infrastructure on which products and services are communicated. Finally, standards bodies are working to help streamline the way different systems work together and communicate. If Helland is right and information technology follows the same pattern as industrial technology, then we can look forward to ever-increasing efficiencies in system integration or, as Helland put it, hooking s[tuff] together.

About the Author
Ken McNamee is a senior software developer with Vertigo Software, a leading provider of software development and consulting services on the Microsoft platform. Prior to this, he led a team of developers in rearchitecting the Home Shopping Network's e-commerce site, HSN.com, to 100 percent ASP.NET with C#. Readers can contact him at kenm@vertigosoftware.com.