Achieving an Evergreen Solution
- Murteza Salemi
In the IT industry, from time to time, we hear terms and notions that carry special meaning within the industry. Evergreen is one of them. One of the dictionary definitions of 'evergreen' is something that remains perennially fresh, interesting, or well liked. But what does evergreen solution or technology means within IT context?
Simply put evergreen can be translated to ever relevant. In other words, a solution that has the capabilities to sustain and adapt to changes, and to continue to re-innovate and evolve through service capabilities over time.
How do we build an evergreen solution?
Is there any technology, architecture or process that can provide us with such a solution that remains ever relevant during its operation and life span within an organization?
In my opinion, no technology, architecture or process can provide such an evergreen solution that can meet today’s ever changing requirements and business needs; unless you engineer it to do so and consider all the enablers i.e. technology, architecture and process that help to achieve this goal.
Providing an evergreen solution is a subject that has many facets and IT practitioners have expressed their views on it and suggested many approaches for it. Some of these view points are as follows:
- A clear business strategy will lay the path for creating an evergreen solution by applying principles such as aligning business processes to business goals, etc.
- Mainframes have historically been there and will always be there hence it is “Evergreen”
- Evergreen solutions can be built by defining and governing an enterprise technology architecture that promotes standardisation
- An evergreen solution means 24/7 system availability
- An evergreen solution is to architect for change and consider content, process and people elements and not just the “technology” by itself
- SOA powered by a governance framework provides for a sustainable evergreen solution that is flexible and adaptable
- SaaS is the way to go for delivering an evergreen solution, as it is incumbent on the service provider to “keep it evergreen” i.e. relevant to changing business objectives.
Each of the above approaches has its own interpretation of the evergreen requirement for a solution. Although there are different approaches, there is still some commonality between them as the end result is the same for all these approaches - i.e. building a solution that can sustain changes and innovate over time.
