This is going to be one of those controversial discussions, so I’m ready for the flack. There is a movement that is out there that is about to break loose and it involves business professionals building their own processes and applications because they can. IT is in a difficult position in that they can’t stop it, but need to worry about the long term impacts on the organizational performance. Let’s delve into this quagmire a bit.
![MPj04424290000[1]](http://blogs.gartner.com/jim_sinur/files/2009/09/windowslivewriterthesecretisoutthebusinessisbuildingproce-a70cmpj044242900001-2.jpg)
Business Should and Will Continue
It’s easier now to build processes and applications because there is infrastructure out there that makes it easy. Today you can find BPM in the cloud, BPM and apps on Google, mini-applications on IPods and application building capabilities available through Force, and Microsoft Sharepoint is everywhere. How long do you think it will be until some savvy BPM vendor comes up with a BPM application for the IPod? Face it, IT and it’s custom/packaged applications is being short circuited. I believe this is good to a point and goes beyond just prototyping new ways of supporting business operations in ways that responds to business pressures and the need for agility.
Business Should Beware
As the business relies more heavily on these new infrastructures, will they be able to hold up to high scale? Will the business folks really want to take on the tasks to maintain these processes and applications? Who is going to build the integration components to glue these new processes apps together? Will the business folks build and IT be stuck with the results? How does one make sure there is not rampant duplication of processes and applications? There are lots of questions and issues.
There needs to be a balance that is held together by some form of strategy and inventory that could include light weight business optimization and modeling tools or find ways to plug into a formal enterprise architecture effort. These are exciting and dangerous times. IT must facilitate some form of awareness even if it includes helping with some form of portfolio management.
12 responses so far ↓
1 Phil Ayres // Sep 10, 2009 at 3:11 pm
Jim, as ever you are picking some good questions. It caught my interest as I was having a similar discussion with an analyst at another firm today.
My feeling is that the reason business people have to build apps is that their IT or systems teams just don’t have the time or experience to do the same. Or that the BPM system they implemented is just too inflexible to deal with the real world and needs constant adaptation (I don’t always buy into the rate of change of business being the driver for agility, feeling its often just an excuse for poorly implemented systems).
Whatever happens, easy to implement process based apps are needed, and I don’t believe that more and more fancy BPMN modelers are the answer. I have one thought around this that I’m not quite ready to share (stay tuned), but I also blogged about my experiences with the failings of IT in this regard on a recent BPM project in Mexico City: http://improving-nao.blogspot.com/2009/06/your-systems-group-is-reason-you.html
Looking forward to a good discussion…
2 Ian Gotts // Sep 10, 2009 at 5:53 pm
The Force.com “busines building apps” phenomenon is become quite pervasive – not just in small companies but in enterprises.
It raises several challenges for CIOs which are discussed in more in my blog http://bit.ly/dGIIS , but in summary are:
- uncontrolled cloud-based apps are moving data outside the firewall which is potentially high risk
- the business are building apps that are duplicating apps which the CIO has already funded
- those apps the business are building are being built with little or no rigor : process modelling, data modelling, testing, implementation
Which is where BPM applications (process mapping and end user execution) are critical. “Business Optimisation Management” apps?
Easy enough for end-users to capture processes and deploy are the ‘operations manual’ to support the implementation.
3 David Wright // Sep 10, 2009 at 8:58 pm
This is not new, starting back with spreadsheets being used as business apps, followed by Microsoft Access. Any app developed in this way has pretty much the same end; it becomes something the business depends on, and then it starts having problems that the business can’t fix, and that’s when IT gets called to try and save the day.
I can see it happening again with these latest/greatest things available directly to the business.
IT can’t stop this from happening for all the reasons about limited resources and such. I have seen companies try to ban these apps because of the risks they bring, but that is not going to work. My idea was/is for IT to actively engage those power users out in the business, give them support in the tools they are using, including a process fo migrating an app to IT production, hopefully before it has problems.
In this way, power users become a local extension of IT, adding to the overall resource pool. You can certainly get input for what the business needs in its systems by monitoring what the business is building itself.
4 Jim Sinur // Sep 10, 2009 at 9:49 pm
What is new is the depth, breadth, intensity and benefit level involved. The game has been upped to a new level
5 The Secret is Out: The Business is Building Processes and Applications - Dhiren Shah’s Blog // Sep 11, 2009 at 4:16 pm
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6 jon pyke // Sep 12, 2009 at 4:32 am
Jim you’re right on the money but then you knew you’d get support for this from me. There will be many ways in which the cloud will change businesses and the economy, most of them hard to predict, but one theme is already emerging. In the current economic environment businesses will have to become more like the technology itself: more adaptable, more interwoven and more specialized.
This has led directly to a big up take in end user driven process or application development – as always lots of terms emerging situational Applications, situational processes, mash up processes etc. But this is all about Business Technology and it is a very different proposition from what we think of as applications it therefore represents a very different opportunity and is a mechanism whereby a user can put together an “application” based around normal working patterns, using readily available services.
This means that is possible to handle any sort of business problem usually tackled by enterprise solutions by being able to leverage the capability to associate virtually any number of web services within the context of an application. Process Provisioning is effectively an application generator within a process and is inherently more flexible, easier to provide, easier to manage and easier to use than traditional “ERP” type products.
7 Jonathan Sapir // Sep 12, 2009 at 7:20 pm
Until now, IT had the sole means of production (programmers) and the sole means of delivery (the data center). The advent of platforms like Force.com will change the role of IT from builder to facilitator.
We are seeing this being played out in the rapid growth of a compelling new analyst-centric methodology, whereby an analyst works closely with business users to build their own solutions. The analyst ensures that these solutions are built in a robust manner, and they interface with IT to provide the programming and integration services needed to fill the gaps left open by the platform.
As these platforms become more and more powerful, the need for IT services will continue to diminish, and many business applications will be built without any involvement from IT at all (other than the analyst, who may or may not work for IT).
This will happen a lot faster than most people think, causing a serious disruption in IT.
8 BPM Blog - Ultimus // Sep 17, 2009 at 3:24 pm
[...] was recently reading a blog from Jim Sinur of Garnter, The Secret is Out: The Business is Building Processes and Applications. It got me thinking on this [...]
9 Clayton Costa // Sep 22, 2009 at 6:18 pm
Jim,
It’s an interesting trend to observe, after all. But I think that BPM suites are not the perfect tool to automate ANY kind of process. I mean, BPM is great for *some* use cases, not for all. The risk of the business area building (automating) their own process is the one Maslow called “the law of the instrument”: “Give a small boy a hammer, and he will find that everything he encounters needs pounding”. Or, in other terms, give BPM (and cloud computing resources) to the end-users and they will start to re-build the entire applications porfolio – without big concerns with things like SLA’s, governance, security and so on.
If we take the departamental workflow projects of 90’s as an example, we find thousands of very sucessful projects – that didn’t scale enough, or changed fast enough, to follow the pace of businesses, and died – or became “legacy applications” to the IT departments.
BPM can be a very powerful tool to enable better and more agile business processes, but without considering the overall IT architecture… it might be just (another) IT wave…
10 Jim Sinur // Sep 23, 2009 at 12:57 pm
Overall business contexts, technical contexts and information architecture is always important. Agreed. BPM is a key discipline that is quite pervasive.
11 Alok Misra // Sep 27, 2009 at 11:14 am
Jim,
You pose some very good questions about IT’s role in the Cloud world. Will IT continue to play an important role within their organization, when the business now has the option of getting their apps developed on platforms such as Force.com, without IT involvement?
CIOs need to do some serious thinking and figure out how they’d add value. I’ve covered some of this in my blog post at:
http://www.navatarforce.com/financial/does-the-cio-have-a-role-in-the-cloud/
Would love to hear your views.
Alok Misra
Principal
Navatar Group
http://www.navatargroup.com
Blog: http://www.navatarforce.com
12 Stefano Pogliani // Sep 28, 2009 at 12:08 pm
I think that, as for everything, the truth is not on the extreme.
I think that “user created Business Processes” are required in order to
keep on with the backlogshort-circuit intermediation that can introduce noise
As someone already stated before, this is not fundamentally different from what happened 15 years ago (or longer) when business users started to use Excel (and Access). The need is there, but sometimes if the need is not properly followed and governed, it could introduce additional issues.
So, I think that the convergence between 3 technologies may perhaps address the need in an “enterprise way”:
SOAPortalsMashups
I have written a couple of posts sometimes ago in my own blog : Two faces of the same coin and Mashups, web2.0 and the SOA cake
In this sense, I think that Cloud and SaaS may be accelerators (because of the possibility to quickly and cheaply realise what is needed) ut do not change the scenario (in the sense of the needs and the solution)
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