Object Orientation default for Digital

We are living in the world where everything is moving towards becoming “smart”. In everyday operations, smart phone have replaced the place of traditional phones. Before the entry of traditional mobile phones, telephone calls were done using legacy desk phones. Traditionally telephone exchanges were operated by humans that are now replaced by sophisticated exchange servers. We have witnessed the phenomenon progress of telephones becoming smart phones. Smart phones are being used now a days for other purposes more than just using it for making the voice calls. Internet has played a major role in changing the role of mobile phone and bringing hand held devices in hands of community.

Internet of Things supported by cloud and big data are innovating the way the businesses are executed. All these individual elements are working in synchronization to achieve the expected business innovation. There are sensors, smart devices and equipment and even smart mobile phones are playing phenomenal role in consumer economy. In this context, success is directly proportional to the approach of making these individual components work in perfect harmony. Slightest misalignment would compromise the business transformation success significantly.

Magnitude of the entire spectrum is overwhelming. Connected devices are expected to grow over 25 billion by year 2020. There are around 16 billion mobile devices by year 2020. Mobile users will grow to around 7 billion by year 2020. IP traffic will reach to 194 EB per month by year 2020. Challenge of managing this magnitude is not in the dearth of computing power or lack of interconnecting technology. Challenge is more in the approach to make these key elements work together to achieve business objectives.

If we look closely, Object Oriented philosophy and principles are at the core of successful orchestration of these various distinct but interrelated elements. Going back to old days of Object Oriented era when Grady Booch concepts were being attempted to revolutionize traditional application solution realization. Those days Object Oriented principles were primarily utilized from applications development perspective. . In the Digital era, these Object Oriented ("OO") concepts are more important and applicable than ever before. In layman language, the OO approach is based on the fundamental principal of encapsulating the information and allowing only the owner element of that information to utilize and update it. This enables to avoid the complications otherwise would be created by interlaced information exchange and updates by unintended actions. The OO concepts are also based on interface agreements between two elements respecting their own private space. This enables individual element context to be preserved and bind it to the encapsulated information and interfaces. All these fundamental principles of OO enables easy adoption of distributed computing and Big Data based processing.

In Digital context, Object Oriented approach should not only be looked at Applications level alone but also should be considered at other levels of Digital Transformation journey and for various building blocks of Digital solution:

1. Each element in IOT ecosystem must respect the boundary of their operations and information integrity. Other way of looking at it is, for every IOT element, not to interfere with each other elements autonomy in terms of information integrity.
2. When information leaves the senor end point and reaches the processing unit (may be on the cloud), it is very natural to lose the context of the information that is being conveyed. Processing unit should maintain the architecture to respect the information integrity.
3. Analysis of information in business context to transform data into insight and actions should also respect the information integrity and boundaries set by each element of IOT, Big Data and Analytics ecosystem.

Not applying the OO principles throughout the business transformation solution development process could lead to complete disaster resulting into information spaghetti and unmanageable information interdependency for analytics and next best action scenarios.