People-centric IT for a new decade

Continuing my review of emerging trends that are going to be big in 2010, here’s one that I suspect will be a defining theme for IT throughout the coming decade. In one of my favorite postings of 2009 back in September, I called this trend The democratization of IT. Developing those thoughts over the past few days on my ebizQ blog, I picked the term People-Oriented Architecture, which of course is a play on a more familiar technology term:

“I’ve used the term people-oriented architecture to make a deliberate contrast with our experience of service-oriented architecture in the past decade. Unlike SOA — which too often sought to remake the way that computers talk to one another without any reference to or consideration of user needs and business results — people-oriented architectures have to be developed collaboratively and iteratively with users and business owners, giving them as much freedom and autonomy as possible to control and manage information and processes to achieve the results they want. It’s an acknowledgement that people are both the commanding providers and the ultimate end consumers of any of the services in a computing architecture.”

Another way of looking at this is to agree with blogging colleague and SOA maven Joe McKendrick that SOA is moving into a low-key “roll-up-your-sleeves-and-make-the-stuff-work stage”, while the business and user context comes to the fore. As an ebizQ reader commented, calling it people-oriented architecture is to use same technology jargon that has kept IT apart from the users, who just want to get on with it and don’t care what it’s called.

Of course it’s been the Web that has been instrumental in putting computing power in the hands of users in a way that lets them get a job done without having to become computing experts. Many of the trends I write about, including cloud computing, software-as-a-service and enterprise 2.0, are at the forefront of bringing the same access to computing power into the enterprise environment. This is a highly disruptive process on all fronts, but I think the biggest pressure points surround the more controversial fusion of social computing and enterprise applications that comprise enterprise 2.0. Many people are uncomfortable about using the word ’social’ in an enterprise context, but I made the opposite case in a post in November:

Read the complete article @ Software as Services.