The impact of an application grows with the square of available interfaces

In order to increase the speed with which IT provides value to the business, you need to be able to re-use existing solutions in new contexts. You don't know in advance which systems it will make sense to integrate in the future, so you need to make sure that you have as many interfaces available as possible. That's why the Technology That Fits manifesto says The impact of an application grows with the square of available interfaces.

Lack of proper interfaces is especially a problem in two places:

• Tactical applications built quickly to solve a specific need
• Commercial Off-The-Shelf (COTS) software

Your tactical applications can become a problem if they are successful. Quick-and-dirty applications that fail or only only solve the specific problem they were built for are not a problem. But successful tactical applications will live long beyond their expected lifespan. If you build them using a closed Rapid Application Development (RAD) tool, your business logic will be stuck inside the application and you will have to re-build it when you need it in some other context. Any time your developers propose you use some magical RAD tool they have seen in a conference video, ask if it makes it easy to provide interfaces to whatever you build with it.

Commercial Off-The-Shelf software provide another challenge. The business will be enamored by fancy demos and the immediate value they can see the software providing for human users. But you, as an IT professional, need to think beyond the user interface. That's why you need to ask about the interfacing capabilities of any new software package. Modern, cloud-native applications tend to have good APIs built in. But many vendors only reluctantly offer APIs and only for a very limited subset of the total application functionality. You don't want to add closed systems like that to your system landscape.

We don't know the future. But we can see that it will require more flexibility. Don't allow yourself to be locked in.

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