On April 29, ’24, iBestuur reported that a government agency is seeking help from “the market” to standardize their ICT systems. The condition is that the solutions offered are linked to the use of market standards and the provision of standard services.
The thesis: Solve this institution’s ICT problems by providing them with agile and flexible applications that can be easily scaled up and down, and take the maintenance of legacy and end-of-life systems off their hands. It reminds me of the comment; “if we didn’t have legacy, it would have been done a long time ago!”
Even ERP solutions being offered will not deliver exactly the desired combination of HR-CRM-BI-Finance-Fraud Recognition-Security-Web-App challenges that a large “company” like this institution needs. In the end, there will be 3-4 vendors left, all offering some part of the solution. That these vendors then have no use for building a seamless integration with another (competing) vendor immediately shows where market standards fail at the application level. Application vendors want only one thing; to buy as much software as possible from them, and not others, and create as much dependency as possible.
In addition to standard applications, a government agency also requires a lot of customization. And the suppliers of standard services have to provide the links for that as well? Then the dependence on application suppliers becomes very high. Because who is going to take responsibility if one of the suppliers decides to modify something so that the links from other suppliers no longer work? This shows exactly where the shoe pinches; we cannot solve this at the application level, but we can solve it one layer below, at the application integration level.
If the data stored by an application is easily, quickly and securely interchangeable with any other random application then IT is automatically flexible. Then new combinations of data from different applications can easily be made. New applications are implemented faster because they can easily use existing data. More importantly; when changing one of the applications, there is no need for lengthy learning vendor consultations to get everyone back on the same page.
IT is hybrid, it has been for decades and always will be. There will always be multiple vendors offering the same type of solution and no organization is the same so there will always be different types of solutions. So look for the solution to integration problems not in application vendors but in an integration architecture that is not dependent on one or more vendors. Only THEN will ICT problems as we have known them for decades really be solved.
