An intriguing paper by Professor Matthew West et al defines the “intelligence” of computer systems in three ways [1]: their ability to understand the world, interact with the world, and their level of self-awareness. For example a system that has an “API” (application programming interface) that defines how it is to be invoked is more intelligent than one without, since a change in the underlying structure of the system does not cause the interfaces to other systems to break. There is a high correlation between the maintenance costs of systems and their absence of “intelligence”. To see the effect, there was recently an in-depth comparison of two data warehouse packages (one relatively “unintelligent”, one rather brighter) at a major US manufacturing company. It was found that the smarter system was able to handle changes to the business model 100 times faster than the dumber one. That is not 100% faster – 100 times faster.

The key to this dramatic difference was that one of the two packages has its entire application driven from an underlying business model. When the software is installed, the first thing that is done is to define the business model, e.g. product hierarchies, customer classifications etc. All the necessary data warehouse application load routines, etc are generated off this business model, and when the model changes, the system adapts to that change easily. One (different) customer of the same software reported a change that previously would have taken three months being done in three hours using this (fairly) intelligent software.

Unfortunately most of our computer systems today barely register a blip on the Matthew West scale of intelligence, indeed most are daft as a brush. Even trivial changes to input file structures cause interface and load programs to have to be modified. If something unexpected happens to the business process that the designers didn’t think of, it gets worse. The pensions systems in one company I worked for developed a major headache when one member of staff had a sex change, which affected their retirement age etc. The system, not designed with such events in mind, required very significant and costly maintenance to allow it to deal with this unexpected event.