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Editor's note: This is the second of a three-part smart enterprise series for Smart Grid News by GTM Research senior analyst Chet Geschickter, who authored The Smart Utility Enterprise 2011-2015: IT Systems Architecture, Cyber Security and Market Forecast. Chet will discuss the report and field questions on smart grid utility enterprise technologies and markets in a free webinar on Sept. 29. Click here for more on the report and webinar.

By Chet Geschickter

Have you ever noticed how computers running Windows eventually slow down and sometimes fail altogether? Once a computer reaches three to four years of age seems to be the break point.  Contrary to popular perception, the early demise of PCs is not from planned obsolescence or industrial conspiracy.  The culprit is more likely the complexity of accidental architecture. 

The problem with Windows is that it’s a complex operating system coordinated with a patchwork quilt of separate .dll’s (dynamic link libraries) and other bits of object code – that continuously change as updates are installed and new software is loaded.  Eventually, the system becomes messy and convoluted causing gradual brownout, or worse, catastrophic fatal error – the dreaded “blue screen of death.”

Contrast this with the Macintosh user experience: intuitive, reliable and clean.  There may be an equivalent to a .dll in a Mac, but most people would be hard-pressed to tell you what that is.  Further, security is built into the operating system.  Separate “anti-virus” programs are not needed.

The innocent application programming interface (API) is the gateway drug to accidental architecture addiction.  Need to open an outage incident from within your interactive voice response application?  Just write to the outage management system API.  Need to push an engineering design out to a work crew?  That’s what the mobile workforce management work order API is for.

The problem is not the individual integrations; they work fine.  The problem is that, over time, the number of relationships grows to the point where they become impossible to track.  Upgrades become difficult and replacing an application is like brain surgery – one slip up can bring down the system.