I’ve recently been reading a few articles about the future of application development and IT infrastructure management.  I believe that one of the main issues that face most IT pros is that we get caught up in the buzz word factory.  Today’s latest: Cloud computing, Web 3.0, etc.  What we fail to realize when we speak about the future of our architecture is the changing dynamic of our end users.

We, as a profession, need to realize that the end user is really what keeps us working.  It used to be that the goal of any application was to cater to the least common denominator, the weakest user.  If we could get that person to be productive and make less mistakes while using the software we wrote, then it was a success.  I believe that the paradigm has shifted.

I attend meetings every day where a user has created an application using Excel or Access.  Typically these applications have a degree of sophistication that amazes me given the lack of formal training and IT processes.  I’ve come to realize that most of the folks that work on these have ‘grown up’ in a technology enabled life.  I’m not just talking about 20 something's here.  The level of sophistication spans all generations.  For example, my father called me the other day to inform me that he updated his weather station so that it automatically FTP’s data to his website.  We are talking about a guy who no less than five years ago would ask me how to configure his email account. 

As a technologists we need to start thinking about embracing this trend.  We need to stop thinking about the lowest common denominator and begin thinking about how to enable users to ‘mash up’ or create their own technology solutions.  We can see this trend in BI trends. Analytic capabilities are being pushed to the end user.  No longer is a static report acceptable.  Users need and want the ability to drill through data, create their own reports and share with their peers.

Perhaps we, as technologists, need to re-explore the promise of SOA.  Not as core architecture, but a way for end users to plug-in, utilize the centralized logic and resources so they can leverage tools to make applications that work for them.

My advice for IT pros and lowest common denominator of users is the same: Adapt, or become obsolete.