The challenges that IT and business are facing in the competitive 21st century are all too familiar ...
- IT governance and project delivery processes are cumbersome and do not support the speed-to-market needs of the business
- "One size fits all" approaches for development and support are unwieldy
- Application usability is becoming more of a differentiator on the internet
- Web development is becoming more complex and skills are hard to acquire and retain
... and the fact that development projects have long since reached breaking point, is not news
75% of all US IT projects are considered to be failures by those responsible for initiating them.*
75% of all software projects at Fortune 500 companies fail, 33% are cancelled, and 66% go over budget by more than 200%.*
24% of application development projects are cancelled or are never used, and 44% are considered unsuccessful*
Abandoned systems cost $100 Billion in the USA alone in 2000*
20-30% of projects realise no net benefit however measured*
* Gartner Group
* The Standish Group
* ECIS
* Remenyi and Sherwood-Smit
Genuine collaboration is emerging as the key to productivity in the customized software era
In traditional software development, the business users will work with a Business Analyst (or programmer analyst) to define requirements, so the business can sign off and the development process can begin. This can be done either in large, protracted development efforts or smaller chunks (the Agile approach.)
New browser-based development environments will serve as collaboration points between developers and business users, allowing the immediate creation of working software.
The notion that customized software development is best avoided, will become outdated
Where we once experienced:
. . . we will now expect as normal:
Disconnected and frustrated stakeholders
Immediate project feedback and a heightened collaborative productivity
Resource burdened IT departments
Components constructed by specialist teams or easily distributed to external resources
Delays in having suitable infrastructure assigned to our projects
Immediate access to the needed infrastructure at any stage of the project lifecycle
Slow error resolution and frustration with the reporting process
Instant feedback loops between users and developers and rapid identify and fix
It's time for developers to be given not only high-productivity, but complete flexibility
Today it's a trade-off: flexibility or productivity. Developers who opted for productivity, did so at the expense of having the freedom to build anything they could imagine. New tools are now emerging that break the age-old truism of what seemed a binary choice; today you can have both, high-productivity and complete flexibility. This means native browser-based Rich Internet Applications (RIAs), highly optimized towards end-user productivity, will become the norm and not the exception; we're entering the era where application-user productivity is the new measure of successful software.
Genuine competitive advantage will lie on the traditional IT boundaries
In today's high pressure world competitive differentiation is more vital yet harder to attain than ever. Enterprise IT packaged software will do a great job of keeping up with the back of the pack and SaaS now does the same more cost effectively. However, competitive advantage lies in what you do differently, better, smarter, faster. Innovation comes from smart ideas in the lines of business, driven by the marketplace, the customer, and the drive to beat the competitor. Then it lies trapped in the application backlog queue because on average CIOs must spend 80% of their budget "keeping the lights on".
The processes, tools and complex teams used on massive, strategic projects are overkill, the situational application tools used by the lines of business as a last resort are plagued by security, support, and a host of other issues. Something had to change. It has.
"Highly productive, easy to learn and use development environment that delivers business applications that are customizable, changeable, capable of implementing serious business functionality and, when deployed, offered with massive scalability, high-end enterprise-class (and beyond) performance and reliability, supporting massive amounts of data, all at SMB prices." This describes a state-of-the-art cloud application platform, an APaaS - Gartner Group "APaaS: A Step to a 'Killer App' for Cloud Computing?"
Disruptive? You bet!
Cloud based application development will bring real new possibilities for productivity improvement into the custom development space; in particular, those types of applications that will define competitive efficiencies and refine business processes.
It's a path that will allow us to not merely manage complexity, but embrace it.
