Remember the saying, “good things come in small packages?” In enterprise architecture big is out and small is in. This applies not only to the obvious consumer electronics market, where PDAs, phones, chips, and everything electronic seems to be getting smaller and sleeker, but also to the broader computing market (such as the transition from mainframe to distributed computing) and even to the storage device market.
The Wall Street Journal, 10 January 2008, reports that Mr. Moshe Yanai “was responsible for one of
How did Mr. Yanai do this?
He did this by going small. “One point of the architecture is simplicity of management of data…with his architecture, you just add more pieces.”
In creating Symmetrix disk drives, Mr. Yanai developed storage drives that were “cheaper, faster, and more reliable than
The small disk drives of
Mr. Yanai, a one time Israeli tank commander, is a User-centric enterprise architect. He recognized the needs of his users for smaller, cheaper, and faster devices and he delivered on this. Moreover, Mr. Yanai put the customer first not only in terms of product design and development, but also in terms of customer service. “Mr. Yanai was known as an expert engineer who also could talk to customers and solve their problems. Mr. Yanai put telephones in each storage device and programmed them to ‘phone home’ when it sensed a part was in danger of failing.”
While Mr. Yanai was removed from his top engineering role at
From a User-centric EA perspective, the small and agile often wins out over the large and stodgy. It is a lesson thousands of years old, like the biblical tale of David vs. Goliath, when little David defeats the monstrous Goliath. Small is nimble and big is cumbersome. This is the same thing the
