Does anyone remember VITAL? I was thinking about it just the other day. The two original founders of my start up company, Marty Moseley and Subhash Chowdary, lived by it and infected me with the vision back in the early 90’s. It stands for Virtually Integrated Technical Architecture Lifecycle. It was brilliant!

VITAL provided a definition of the internet, data warehousing, business intelligence, and service oriented architecture before any of those terms had been coined. As an enterprise technical architecture, all of these components worked together; at least they did on paper.

Today, most of VITAL has become part of the fabric of our everyday life. The internet made thin client the norm, once and for all. Business intelligence is at the top of almost every CIO concern list, worldwide. More business decision makers rely on critical information than every before. Application modernization is gaining steam. And

But there is one VITAL frontier that has yet to be conquered. I’m talking about a world where business intelligence and service oriented architectures come together. Imagine that: Loosely coupled information services available for use by people and other services on the fly. It sounds a lot like Google Gadgets for the enterprise.

The googlization of information is not far away.