The Best Line of Code is the One You Didn't Have to Write!

This post isn't about code reuse or developing web services. Surely, you and your development organization understand the benefits of developing modular code, packing it in libraries, developing APIs and web services, insuring that test cases are automated, and hopefully starting to enable continuous delivery. Hopefully you have the architectural practices that recognize build once, leverage multiple times is critical to a software development organization's success in scaling to support multiple applications at higher levels of quality.

This is also not a post about code readability. Again, hopefully your organization has some basic methodologies on naming conventions, coding standards, code reviews, tools, and metrics to insure that code developed by one developer can be understood and maintained by other developers and teams.

How PaaS can Accelerate IT at Lower Investments


This post is about PaaS platforms. Platforms as a Service is a cloud computing platform or service. Whereas Infrastructure as a Service will give IT the low level infrastructure such as a Windows or Linux environment, PaaS platforms represent a computing container. Virtually all the major software vendors and cloud providers have PaaS offerings and Gartner has an extensive taxonomy of different service types.

The PaaS services that excite me as CIO enable light weight, ideally code-less applications. These are higher level environments above programmable database, application, or integration computing PaaS. The higher level PaaS platforms are often suited to specific types of applications such as workflow, analytics, data integration or document management. The platforms then provide tools to configure, develop business rules, or customize user interfaces without or with very minimal coding. The PaaS platforms that are most advanced enable a wide array of applications and can be developed with minimal technology skill set. In fact, some of them fit the "self service" category and can be developed by business users with proper training and IT provided governance practices. Mature platforms also include capabilities such as user directory integration, APIs, mobile and tablet views and standard methods to automate data integration. The most promising PaaS platforms demonstrate significant customer adoption, have proven scalability and performance records, and have low costs enabling IT teams to develop products off of them.

No Code = Speed to Market


In my experience, the best of these platforms accelerate time to market significantly as they enable teams to develop applications without a lot of software development (code) and testing. The very best ones are so light weight, they enable teams to be experimental and change implementations with minimal cost to unwind and rebuild.

Too good to be true? It's not, and the benefits are real, but it isn't trivial to achieve. The real issue is selecting the right platforms that offer the most flexibility for the expected needs with minimal functionality constraints and technology implementation complexities. You can't easily evaluate this by listening to sales people, reviewing analyst reports, or even doing some proof of concepts. I might have to develop a sequel to my top ten attributes of agile platforms to help identify strong contenders.

But for now, software developers should think beyond "good code" or even "great architecture" and think more about "smart solutions" that enable more capabilities with little or minimal code.


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Breakthrough Innovation: From Senseless Sensors to the Internet of Things and Everything

It's hard to escape the media hype on the Internet of Things, the Internet of Everything, or the Industrial Internet. Whether its valuation on the size of the industry ($7.1 trillion by 2020 according to IDC), estimates on the number of sensors(50 billion by 2020 according to Cisco), or futurists predicting the disruption and opportunities coming from IoT technologies that connect the physical and digital world, the media will leave you little doubt that this will be the next big, very big technology paradigm.

IoT Today


But today, what you are mostly seeing is more devices, more innovation in application context specific sensors, or very small networks of connected devices. Examples include home automation networks, wearable fitness devices, transit optimization, smart cities addressing growing energy needs, and beacons in retail stores. The costs of sensors have dropped, and the skills to develop the device and applications are more accessible, so entrepreneurs and corporations already in the device or sensor market can experiment and potentially break through with a market leading product.

Some of these devices will succeed, and the scale will create new technology challenges. Will network infrastructure keep up with the added bandwidth requirements for these devices? Will new security and privacy challenges created by these devices get addressed sufficiently before vulnerabilities are exposed?

Internet Enabled "Senseless Sensors" or Greater Intelligence?


Still, I think this is still the world of senseless sensors. The software in most of these devices largely have local context. Wearable gadgets largely benefit a single user and the parent corporation that gets access to the aggregation of all the data collected. Home automation connects devices in a home with no broader context around neighborhood. Beacons will enhance the experience in the store you are visiting and its parent, but do not provide a local context yet.

Now imagine a shopping mall that finds an intelligent way to pool data between retail outlets, aiming to keep shoppers spending time and money in the mall for longer time periods. What happens when cars communicate to neighboring ones to help avoid collisions? What happens when health monitoring sensors can be programmed to share selected data depending on context to family members or physicians?

Now, think what happens when these same sensors also have logic to respond to its environment. Your car alerts you to slow down, or your physician adjusts your medication levels. So the device not only measure and respond to local conditions, the rules implemented also include variables of greater context.

This to me, is the beginning of the promise of the internet of things.

Breakthrough Success Requires Partnership and Standards


Technology companies are now forming coalitions to pave the way to this future. There is the Open Internet Consortium led by Intel, Dell, and Samsung that is focused on sensor interoperability. Then there is the Industrial Internet Consortium led by IBM, AT&T, Cisco, and GE aimed to accelerate the growth of the industrial internet. In digital health there is an emerging battle between Google Fit, Apple HealthKit and the Samsung Digital Health Initiative all aiming to help control or share fitness data or "create a healthier world".

These coalitions and future partnerships will either accelerate IoT breakthough capabilities or create new barriers, or both. Only time will tell if device manufacturers and software developers will have multiple competing standards to contend with, or if these partnerships will establish an IoT data and integration backbone.

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About Isaac Sacolick

Isaac Sacolick is President of StarCIO, a technology leadership company that guides organizations on building digital transformation core competencies. He is the author of Digital Trailblazer and the Amazon bestseller Driving Digital and speaks about agile planning, devops, data science, product management, and other digital transformation best practices. Sacolick is a recognized top social CIO, a digital transformation influencer, and has over 900 articles published at InfoWorld, CIO.com, his blog Social, Agile, and Transformation, and other sites. You can find him sharing new insights @NYIke on Twitter, his Driving Digital Standup YouTube channel, or during the Coffee with Digital Trailblazers.