Enterprise Grade vs Web Grade

The SPARK discussions continue. Jeff Schneider posted
recently (here
and here)
on the issues we discussed at SPARK. He follows on from a post by Dare
Obasanjo who argues that Enterprise Architects often propose overly complex
solutions to relatively simple problems, and that it is possible to create
robust global-scale IT systems using the Web 2.0 platform with RSS and RESTful
web services without incurring the pain and expense of an all out enterprise architecture
based on WS-*.

Can you imagine running an entire enterprise on Web 2.0 technologies?
Jeff asks a number of Enterprise Architects to speculate what Microsoft Live
might look like and compare it to a typical enterprise application. It turns
out, not surprisingly, that once you’ve taken account of the many issues
and complexities that you have to worry about inside the enterprise (legacy,
compliance, reliability, security, etc) you end up with a complex enterprise
architecture.

What does this tell us? Only that you have to use the right
tool for the right job – universal once-size-fits-all approaches don’t
work. The hard part is understanding the tools and their capabilities and the requirements
of the job you need to do. And that’s where Enterprise Architects fit in…