Who Watches the Watchers

or Upgrading Applications

We all remember our first encounter with recursion when learning programming, and we enjoyed the dictionary definition

• recursion - see recursion

Well it seems like the same introspective view is still alive and well.  One of the challenges of companies deploying an applications suite - Oracle/Siebel/Peoplesoft or SAP - is making it work for their company whilst keeping it supportable.  Applications are written to support as many organisations as possible, and hence they almost work for everybody, but are a perfect fit for no-one.  Companies customise their applications, they extend them and then they discover that it is difficult to upgrade them to the latest vendor release levels.

Well it seems like the answer may well be meta-data.  Data that describes the application configuration.  A promising approach to alleviating some of the problems of applicatoin upgrades is to identify in meta-data where the application has been customised and preserve that customisation across the upgrade.  The same meta-data can be used to describe how an application has been extended and used to map that extension onto the updated release.

This approach isn't going to be perfect but it will allow not just some automatic migration of customisations and extensions but also flagging of migrations that failed or where not possible, for example an extension seems to clash with some new functinality in the next release.

The challenge to making this work is to create a sufficiently rich description of the configurations, customisatoins and extensions to allow some sort of semantic matching.  Personally I feel that this is a good match for semantic web technoligies and may well be a more immediately useful application than dynamci service discovery and matching.

It will be intersting to see how this whole area of configuration management works in the Fusion Applications.