Buzzwords drive the IT industry—always have and always will. This holds true whether you deal with structured programming, object-oriented programming, client/server, distributed objects, enterprise application integration, data warehousing, and service-oriented architecture. Now it’s cloud computing with all its related buzzwords. We tend to chase the hyped trends.
This industrywide practice drove me to coin the term “manage by magazine,” where the coolness of a concept or term becomes more important than the actual applied value. Today I call it “buzzword-oriented architecture,” or BOA. The trouble with this approach is that you try to solve a problem by force-fitting a specific solution, regardless of fit. In other words, you “know” the answer before you truly understand the problem.
