Cross domain confusion.

I’ve just recently decided to get started using Twitter, which I don’t completely understand yet, but most likely because most of the users who are following me are either looking to get married in order to leave the Ukraine, or begging for credit card information in order to get their favourite crippled, blind, grandmother a new hip. Not being overly interested in crippled blind people, or getting married to a stranger, I don’t really have much to do on Twitter.

I just found out about the keyword searches on it and have realised that people write on twitter using hashes and different keywords to help organise subjects, so of course did a quick search on #km to see if I could find some people to follow. One of the first things I found was the following link. (Don’t worry, it’s not the blind, crippled grandmother) I did a quick scan of the first sentence and thought it looked interesting, then read the paragraph starting “BTW, forget about ‘enterprise architecture’ or SOA……. “. What frustrates me here is trying to discredit SOA and Enterprise architecture by pretending they meant something else to begin with. SOA(Service Oriented Architecture) and Enterprise Architecture are most definitely terms used in IT, and should only be used FOR IT. They are terms used when one star trek loving, comic con attending individual speaks to another from behind their extremely large calculator and pocket protector. (No offense meant I am one of those individuals by the way) SOA and Enterprise Architecture are used to describe how software, any software, is built, they are terms that instantly allow those who speak Klingon to imagine classes, objects, layers, tiers, and databases without having to read pages of documents describing it all. It is jargon and never during it’s history was it ever directly related to KM or KM software. Using the term SOA is no different from using the term mashup and whether you are using software designed with Enterprise level architecture in mind, or using software that has been created as a mashup does not tell you how good or bad the software is. It does not tell you that the software will or will not work in the business area it is meant to. It will tell you however, how scaleable the software is, how flexible it is, how quick and easy it would be to change the software as the world and the demands change around the software. To simply forget about patterns that work is a mistake. Software in the KM area needs to be able to change, needs to be able to bend to demand, and needs to be scaleable in order to deal with the world and the problems thrown at it. Using a mashup is absolutely fine, so long as the mashup itself has been built correctly, has been thought through correctly, and guess what, usually that means building the mashup on Enterprise Architecture.