As we've mentioned in the past in this blog, the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) is a JackBe customer and an avid adopter of Web 2.0 technologies. Just this past week I had the pleasure to speak on the CTO Panel at DODIIS Worldwide Conference in Chicago, the IT show sponsored by the DIA. It only took a few minutes on the exhibit floor to appreciate the emergence of Web 2.0 as a important initiative in government.
One of the mandates of John Howard, Deputy Associate Director of National Intelligence for Intelligence Community Enterprise Services (the title is very telling in itself!), is that users need to get information in their hands as quickly as possible without government red tape getting in the way. Executive mandates aside, the interest in Enterprise Web 2.0 within this community is not very surprising when you consider that Intelligence analysts are defacto Tacit workers. They are a great example of ad-hoc workers that do something different every day and benefit from correspondingly dynamic and adaptable supporting software systems.
Specifically, this community has shown great interest in using Ajax as an interaction technology and SOA as a business functionality-sharing technology. There's also a lot of buzz around mashups because, I believe, they see the value of ad-hoc integration. Two other issues that were frequently discussed were security and governance. How does an organization, government or not, support common credential authentication and propagation? And these aren't merely rhethorical questions. We heard one speaker give a great practical example: they will support DEERS, a DOD X.509 common credential and attribute service, which is key for any workable multi-service consumption or mashup use. As each service has its own set of user credential, users would have to login to each service which would be unusable.
And like a lot commercial enterprises, the DOD is struggling with other strategic issues related to Web 2.0 technologies like SOA. As the CTO from JFCOM put it, they are already experiencing "SOA silos". Best practices and implementation rubrics are becoming crucial to avoid these kinds of problems. That might sound obvious but most of the big SOA vendors want to own the entire stack and 'integratation' often stops at their own product set. As Scott McNealy (CEO of Sun Microsystems and a keynote speaker at the Conference) said, "Integratable" is important. I couldn't agree more.
As always, the DIA (and the DOD in general) has a lot to teach us commercial folks.
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Since I think in Patterns and JackBe has done lots of Ajax in the last few years, I've tried to organize all the work we’d done as a set of Ajax application patterns. I was able to whittle it down to three:
- The first (obvious) pattern was simple: down-and-dirty Web Apps. Take any old client-server application, applications you need but haven’t gotten around to building, and new enterprise class applications and move them to the browser using Ajax. You’ve probably seen examples of this in the consumer world like self-service travel or account access & bill payment, and in the enterprise world, ‘SaaS’ apps like on-line CRM/ERP. We’ve even done this in one instance where the application was supposed to look exactly like its client-server predecessor. Admittedly, it wasn’t terribly sexy-looking, since the original app was many years old. The application owners wanted to deploy new features easily but didn’t want to retrain a workforce of 10,000+. They got the best of both worlds.
- A second (less obvious) Ajax application pattern is the Dynamic Desktop. You give users easy access to sources of data and logic, easy ways to integrate them, and easy ways to apply visual skins, such as graphs and maps. While this is certainly a popular style in the consumer world, enterprises always have higher requirements in areas like security, governance, and scalability. This application pattern works well in areas where knowledge workers have ever-changing information needs. Think call center staff or anyone with ‘analyst’ in their title. The coolest example I know of is the briefing dashboard we’ve developed for the DIA.
- Finally, the least obvious, but the one I think has the most potential is the 'Web Embeddable'. In this case, the emphasis is on embedding business functionality into a page as a black box. Pretty much like Google Maps, except for the enterprise. The Web Embeddable is delivered from the enterprise data center and all communication between it and the data center is handled out of the box. Many people might think I am talking about snippets and widgets like popup calendars and sliders. This is not that. Think about a mini home loan approval application. Instead of going to a LendingTree.com site to apply, why not have Lending Tree develop a Web Embeddable and syndicate it? Let anyone embed it and get a cut from Lending Tree. Seems to make sense to me (we call this Application Syndication). JackBe did this for a recent customer. We built an e-commerce checkout Web Embeddable that did full catalog and shopping management. The beauty is it doesn't care where it's running because all communication from the application to the data center is self managed and secure. This makes for a wonderful user experence and that is always good for business.
So, which Ajax application pattern have you used?
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One of JackBe's customers, the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), is spotlighted in Computerworld. It's a nice, concise summary of Web 2.0 technologies and their use within the highly-secure, high-demand world of intelligence gathering and analysis.
Sure, it's a bit self-serving to blog about one of our own customers in the news. But it's not every day that the generally-secretive folks in the intelligence community talk about the tools they use in their world. We're very proud of our work with them! And there might even be a few lessons you could learn from their work.
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