| With the bursting of the dot-com bubble over the
last year, some of the pressure for pushing IT departments onto the Internet has lessened.
This is all to the good, as many companies were adopting off the shelf solutions that
really did not fit their needs, or were building poorly thought out B2B or B2C solutions.
Not only did these solutions fail to address internal integration issues, they frequently
revealed the shortcomings of creating a largely standalone system for the web that
integrated poorly with the legacy systems that run the enterprise. Once again, today's
solutions were in danger of becoming tomorrow's problems. Even though the over-hyped and supercharged motivations have fallen
back more or less in line with reality, there is a genuine business case for buying or
building solutions that scale to the web. Now that we have the time to think the problem
through, we have the opportunity to do it right. If we do so, we can solve long-standing
problems of enterprise integration at the same time, while avoiding the creation of new
problems. |
