`The browser wars’ of the 1990s helped drive the internet further and faster. I suspect the reality of that Netscape versus Microsoft’s Internet Explorer made a lot more people aware of the internet than previously. I remember working with the team as our company set up the first company website. 90% of my job was setting up the first internet connection our company had — an ISDN connection to a company in Columbus Ohio. We suddenly had internet mail (SMTP). We also realized that we didn’t have a WWW presence. We built our website and deployed it. Another person on the team took it over from me about halfway through the project (I had some other projects I was working on at the time).
Why am I wandering 20 plus years ago? Well, one of the things that I am looking at is how do you model a business. Enterprise Architects consider the concept of a work unit. A work unit is any set of tasks completed by a user to complete their job. SAP, Peoplesoft both offer extensive suites of software as do many others. Microsoft and Salesforce off online CRM (customer relationship management) solutions. The work units are simple to use cases applied to business needs. Accounting needs to be able to enter information into a system that will track AR and AP (accounts receivable and accounts payable). Based on that each of these represents a work unit.
The problems start when we forget two other components. There is the concept of destination. IE, where is the data going and where is it coming from. The network sits between the work unit and the destination. Why do we care about destinations? Well, the problem with a destination is the implementation of the connection between the destination and the user. That has radically changed over the past ten years. Ten years ago few companies had much more cloud solution than a web presence. Now, many have a significant portion of their organizational assets in the cloud. Some larger companies actually now exist wholly in the cloud. But users aren’t in the office anymore. They, users, are everywhere. So destination, device, and work unit now need to be evaluated at every level of the solution.
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