Guidelines for Building a Flexible Technology Architecture: Andy Mulholland, CTO of Capgemini

Andy Mulholland, the CTO of the Capgemini, one of the world’s largest IT consulting firms, will be the first to tell you that large, monolithic software applications are inflexible and demand conformity.  For years, he says that IT organizations wrote business applications to follow this departmental, monolithic model. “Because of technical constraints, if a company did not think through everything it needed from the application and build it into this at the beginning, it became hard to do anything about it later. As a result, companies ended up with these monolithic applications that covered all possibilities.”

Today, Mulholland says that we are starting to see enterprises return to their core businesses, and to spin off what doesn’t fit. Along with that, the evolution toward Web services is really about how every department in an organization can create its own flexible shared services. He says that companies have to move from monolithic applications to more granular services. “The only way to do that quickly and efficiently is with nimble applications which operate flexibly off a data set and that provide a single version of a particular company’s truth.”

Mulholland is not suggesting that companies abandon their monolithic applications. He says, “Monolithic applications are great for capturing and protecting data about what companies do. But there is focus on how marketing can be better done, how to better understand customers, and how to build Web

services that drive revenue. He points to the ability of companies, such as DHL, FedEx, and UPS, to be service  oriented in the front office, but to have a consolidated architecture in the back office. .

In this podcast, Mulholland, provides guidelines for how IT organizations can make the transition from building monolithic applications to more flexible, granular technology architectures. He also talks about the Web services technologies in his books, Mashup Corporations, and Mesh Collaboration.