Chapter 7
The Democratization of Enterprise IT
We expect this book to have a broader audience than your average techie book: business people as well as techies, architects and implementers, denizens of enterprise IT departments as well as people who work at smaller organizations, start-ups, or technology firms. The Agile Architecture Revolution will impact all of us, after all. But if you haven't worked in, or consulted for, an enterprise IT department, you have no idea how, well, otherworldly they are.
By otherworldly, we mean that they have big-company ways of thinking, talking, working, and making decisions—even though they are responsible for, and work with, technology every day. But if you look at the rest of the technology marketplace—consumer tech, small/midsize business tech, technology in academia, as well as Web-based (oops, we mean Cloud-based) companies, you gain a very different perspective on technology than the “enterprisey” view of big-organization IT.
Here are some examples. How much do you expect to pay for a piece of software? Nothing at all maybe? Okay, 99 cents? Ten bucks? Maybe you want some business software, so maybe $500? What about tens of millions of dollars or more? In enterprises, price tags with more than six zeroes at the end are commonplace.
Fine, let's say you bought that software, and now it's time to install it. How many files do you get from the vendor to execute the install process, and how long does it take? From an app store, one installer ...
