Repeatable, Reusable, Rapid?

I am intrigued by the amount of attention and support being given to “In Praise of Slow”. Originally published in 2004, this book by Carl Honoré is an entertaining and thought provoking commentary on our “culture of speed”. Honoré grabs our attention in the opening pages by describing how his lifestyle has led him to optimize his time with his son, searching out the shortest books for the bed time story, and pondering on why Snow White couldn’t have made do with 3 dwarves! His thesis is that we should pay attention to detail and do important things right first time. Like the slow food movement, set up originally to combat fast food, it’s about preserving culture, heritage, localization and small scale.

I am instinctively supportive of this idea of “doing things right”. In our own industry I worry about unfettered offshoring, agile development adopted purely for speed, the compromise of architectural principles trading short term gain for life time cost.

I note Ron Tolido’s blog develops this theme and extends the idea to Slow IT. Ron suggests “It is about using the principles of Enterprise Architecture to create a platform for continuous business change. This is not a paradox: only on top of a simplified, secure and flexible foundation of building blocks we can orchestrate and change solutions on a daily basis.” He calls it “Slow IT, the art of careful technology”.

I am completely with Ron in rejecting the superficial - Web 2.0, panic package acquisitions and the like for use in serious enterprise business processes. Yes we need to transition enterprise systems to modern componentized architecture that permits continuous upgrade of smaller moving parts.

However for all that I do believe that Slow IT is not going to go anywhere fast! We already have Slow IT today and the opportunities for misunderstanding are legion.

Last week I attended a presentation from Nick Cheetham at the Department of Work and Pensions in the UK. He commented that his organization is one of the few that right now is experiencing growth – because the unemployment rate is set to treble. But for most of us the imperative is to do more with less. And it’s interesting to observe different responses to this pressure.

I see tangible evidence that companies are increasing the rate of offshoring, in order to cut costs. I see others slashing the number of projects and programs, and focusing on the core business. But the primary observable effect is redundancy – reduction in head count, which is driven simply by the numbers. Then it’s up to the retained staff to figure out how to do more with less.

Maybe “slow” is an unintended but inevitable consequence of the current situation the archetypal enterprise is in, but I suggest a more appropriate focus is along the lines of “repeatable, reusable, rapid”. And this applies to everything – processes, services, components, infrastructure, skills, etc.

In this month’s CBDI Journal we publish a report on Implementation Architecture and Automation Unit Specification. This is an area in which we have been teaching and advising for some time, but we realized we hadn’t documented the guidance. It’s a critically important area – you have the business designs, the service specifications, so how do you deliver an effective software design and implementation, and demonstrate to governance reviewers that you are complying with SOA and EA principles and policy? And it’s a classic opportunity area for practicing repeatable, reusable, rapid techniques.

Like many folk, CBDI has been talking and advising on matters relating to repeatable, reusable, rapid for years. I seem to recall the phrase “reuse before you buy before you build” was coined by a colleague in TI around 1994 when we were developing the ideas around Component Based Development. It seems what goes around comes around, which perhaps says “good things come to those that wait”. But that’s different to advocating “slow”, which seems a bit like turkeys voting for Christmas.