Dharmesh Mistry

Newbury

CTO

If what the Met has done works, hooray. The problem generally arises in that the people designing the architecture and standards, aren't the ones that have to implement real applications. Next comes the problem of ENFORCEMENT, and they should know, just because there are laws, doesn't means everyone will follow them !

I believe that IT has constantly tried to create architectures and standards from a technical stand point, and as such enforcement relies on code reviews (standard reviews or the Extreme Programming approach.

So this comes back down to people, their emotions, ego's and experience, not really a recipe for success or being able to scale this up across many developers.

I believe the best and only way to achieve this is to use a toolset that enforces an architecture, such that you can not create database access logic in the presentation layer, or presentation code in the process layer.

Such tools exist, we have used them sucessfully, the only discussion about design, is looking at "business re-use" and selecting deployment platforms (a deployment not development issue).

Such an approach has given us consistent repeatable success, and significant advantages in time to market, allowing us to compete with big systems integrators.

To make a change in IT, you can't make step wise improvments, we need to think different (thanks for the quote Mr Jobs ;o)