eXtreme End-User Driven Architectures (XEUDAs)
There is an emergent solution architecture which the most ingenious of our end users are piecing together without our help. It is an architecture without a name - so let's give it one:
the eXtreme End-User Driven Architecture or XEUDA (zoo-da)
A XEUDA is an Architecture - not an Application. It is an architecture of many applications that end-users compose to empower complex business processes. End users do this by themselves - no developer/IT intervention required.
XEUDA is an architecture that can be changed, rearranged, reconfigured, repurposed, redesigned, re-architected by the end users. Right now end users can only do this to a very limited degree, only with a small sub-set of applications, and only to drive particular activities of some business processes, but if the application architect and developer community, along with the IT governance powers that be, were to relax their grip and embrace this impulse, XEUDAs will push IT controlled architectures aside by producing productivity gains of 10X or more.
Anywhere there is an Enterprise MOSS infrastructure with even a handful of power users you will sense the yearning for XEUDA. MOSS power users and champions build fabulously flexible applications on their MOSS sites. MOSS is a wonderful end-user driven system. But it is not extreme enough - inevitably users drive up to the edge where pieces can no longer connect, where their InfoPath or Word or Excel docs, their content types and custom lists, and their SharePoint enabled LOB applications, are left hanging on a library ledge - their structured and unstructured data in danger of being backed-up into oblivion.
And when the developers and architects are brought in, and the problem is laid out and the requirements gathered, their next impulse, more often than not, is to move to a purpose built application - ripping control out of the hands of the users, and placing it in the hands of a Solution Lifecycle and project managers and development teams and a change management process which may take months or even years to hard boil what the end-users had loosely assembled in a matter of days...
We have all the tools and skills to give those magnificent MOSS and OBA applications the ability to turn into more powerful and more flexible XEUDAs -- what we don't see enough of are architects and developers that are advocating and building the end-user architectable elements that a XEUDA requires; and agile, apolitical, IT governance teams that are ready and willing to hand-off the architectural keys to their power users and domain experts...
