Tuesday, October 24, 2006

Send me the link

I saw a presentation this week by Gartner's Nick Gall in which he talks about the core to emergent architecture being identifiers, format and protocol. It kind of made sense, but today the light bulb finally went off in my head when I overheard someone say "Send me the link". I've heard that and said that hundreds of times before, but now I see what Nick was talking about in regards to identifiers.

The reason why data is so locked up in our IT systems today is you can't just "send me the link". You have to say something like: "Log into Big System a and select the Accounts menu then type in the account number and press OK. The "send me the link" version would be more like: http://big.system.a/accounts?id=123456.

Why not have every piece of information available via a URI? Why not RSS for data feeds of business data, like a Google News Search feed, instead it could be an all new accounts feed like http://big.system.a/accounts?status=new&output=rss.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

A light bulb went off in your head? Maybe you should get it looked at? Here's a link to the doctor hlp.1-800-lightbb.com/nottoosmart

Anonymous said...

Here's a great couple of blogs too. Nothing as serious as this though...

http://unredunnews.blogspot.com/

http://edtedasb.blogspot.com/

Have fun!

Anonymous said...

What's the queens first name?