A thought-piece by Shirish Netke, President - Enterprise Solutions, Aztecsoft

The American alligator may be considered an anomaly of Darwinian evolution. It weighs four hundred pounds, has a brain the size of an olive and a relatively mediocre sense of sight and hearing. Yet, it has been a card-carrying member of the ecosystem for two hundred million years. It’s survival secret?

Some very sophisticated sensory capabilities that can detect the smallest movement of its prey in water and a bite that can exert two thousand pounds per square inch of pressure.

Like the alligator, there are a lot of technology solutions in large enterprise IT ecosystems that survive on brute force and the ability to do a few functions extremely well. Several of these solutions have survived for many years and are an indispensable part of the enterprise environment. New technologies that fail to recognize the dependency on legacy technologies and can not integrate with them are easily marginalized in the enterprise ecosystem. Can disruptive technologies such as Enterprise 2.0 be successfully deployed in such IT environments? Yes. However, they have to crawl before they can walk or run and more importantly they have to co-exist with the alligators.

By John Scarborough, Aztecsoft

Since proponents of Agile processes prefer face-to-face conversation as the means for communication within a development team, in the “distributed Agile model” – in which members of an Agile team are situated in more than one workplace -- this may seem unlikely.

By John Scarborough, Aztecsoft

Their board of directors had been alarmed by the report of deployment failures, and was adamant in insisting that this should never happen again. Because of the number of customizations, and because of the frequency of upgrades, the VP believed that the only solution was full automation. He understood that this could only be a long-term goal, but he wanted my company’s help in making it happen, along with whatever bridge solutions were required between now and then.