In large and mid-size organizations, inferior enterprise IT systems result in massive waste of time and resources, as well as missed opportunities. To cite a single dramatic example, the IRS has spent several billion dollars on failed attempts to modernize their systems.
This collaborative research project with Shinsei Bank seeks to develop design rules and open source frameworks that reduce the cost of developing, deploying, and modifying enterprise IT systems by an order of magnitude or more. The starting point for the research is the software development methodology pioneered by Jay Dvivedi over his forty-year career, including two decades of work at Citibank and Shinsei Bank. The research also draws on my doctoral research on computer-assisted organizing, Herbert Simon’s theories of complex systems developed in The Sciences of the Artificial, and prior work on Shinsei’s IT systems by my colleagues Dave Upton and Brad Staats. I am very grateful to Jay for his patient mentoring, to Shinsei Bank for supporting this research, and to the team at Shinsei’s Banking Infrastructure Group.
The project has four primary goals:
- Formulate a set of design rules for producing highly-evolvable enterprise software architectures
- Develop a toolkit, in the form of an open source software framework, to support the creation of systems that follow these design rules
- Study how computer system designs that mirror the underlying logic of the business can reduce costs of auditing and compliance, specifically in the case of J-SOX
- Investigate the use of computer-assisted organizing techniques to dynamically optimize the allocation of work to available workers
The findings of the project will be reported first in blog format here. Software components developed in the course of the project will be released under the GNU General Public License.