The New Buzzwords You Will Hate by 2016
Freshly returned from yet another conference. Since its nearing the end of year I thought I would put out a semi-prediction about what everyone is going to be buzz-wording about in 2015.
“NO ESB” – The agenda behind the NO ESB movement is this: Stop thinking about message busses and start thinking about APIs. It’s not bad advice. Large Enterprise has been crippled by old legacy systems without APIsfor so long. In the old days we used to dream about connecting all systems by a ubiquitous message bus. 90% of the time these projects failed miserably. The alternative?…API everything. Of course the NO ESB camp has already schism’d saying that it’s not NO ESB but NOT ONLY ESB.
I’d say use what is right for the purpose, but yes, 2015 is the year of the API. Like a daytime soap opera we will be spending hours transfixed on “The Old and the REST-less.” Get it?
“Microservices” – This one right out of the gate is already getting old. But I guarantee you are going to hear more and more about Microservices! Microservices! Microservices! What is it? Not much. It’s basically the same old service oriented architecture except a bit more granular. Like SOA its all about componentization. But with Microservices you might break that up even further with some nice API (hopefully REST) exposure. Think of it as SOA for Millennials.
“NO IT”- This one is actually kind of neat and long overdue. Back in the old days, (EyeTee) sat in their ivory towers dictating how operations will run. This got morphed into running IT as an internal business, where business operations are treated as clients. According to NO IT, this is all over. Remember Neo in the Matrix: “There is no spoon.” With NO IT, there is no IT. According to Gartner, 40% of technology spend is coming directly out of the business, not IT. For that matter, what it really comes down to is the pace of business just can’t wait a week for a technical adjustment. NO IT simply states that Business Operations are not your minions and they are not your clients. They are your peers. NO IT dictates that technologies get out of (Eye Tee) and fold themselves directly into operations.
Of course it’s only a matter of time before someone re-defines NO IT to mean Not Only IT.
“DIY BI” – DIY BI is freaking awesome. Back in the olden days (2001) we had the same need for slick customizable reports as we do now. The trouble is that the data we need is all over the place. Someone came up with a clever idea of an “OLAP Cube” that batch runs, summarizes and dimensions the data. Cool but ornery to setup and impossible for real time reports. With the advent of Tableau, Spotfire and QlikView the cube era is OVER- Gone the way of MySpace. Any old regular business analyst can park Tableau on top of data sets and create really cool reports and dashboards. As always, 90% of the job is data marshalling. (See Citizen Integrator Below)
“Citizen Integrator” – The Citizen Integrator is a real milestone in technology. Integration tools, like our very own K3, have been designed to let regular, non-technical, people create and run integrations. Compared to old integration tools, it’s a major milestone in abstracting users away from coding. In a nutshell Citizen Integrator takes your average Joe or Jane and turns them into a data marshaling powerhouse. How? (see Data Scientist below)
“Data Scientist” – It’s like a job title from the future. Meeting someone with the title of Data Scientist is akin to meeting the President of the United States: somewhat within the realm of possibility, but a rare event. My gut tells me we are going to hear more and more about Data Scientists in 2015. So what is it? In truth a data scientist is 70% data wrangler. To see what I mean ask yourself: Does a snapshot of your morning sound something like “VLOOKUP, VLOOKUP, IF, IF, IF, THEN, TRIM, HLOOKUP, CTRL+D, IF VLOOKUP?| Select *, Join” You might be a Data Scientist! The balance of the workload is doing analysis and reporting. Remember DIY BI above? Well, Citizen Integrator + Smart Analysis + DIY BI = Data Scientist 2015-Beyond.
“IOT” – Don’t worry, not yet another acronym to learn. It’s just “Internet of Things.” You know how cartoons late in their run will do a mashup with another cartoon to squeeze a bit more mileage out of it? This is pretty much the same thing. The powers that be crunch it down to an acronym to get another year of buzzword out of it. Yes. I’m sorry. It looks like another year of vapid conversations about how our toothbrush and toaster can talk over WiFi.
Last but not least:
“DevOps” – If you think that Microservices might get on your nerves, prepare for DevOps. It’s already being badly abused, DevOps is nothing more than how you conduct “development”.
These are all good attempts to describe the frenetic pace of change in the tech world…but buzzwords…please stop…please just stop.
