How situational applications enable CIOs to employ fewer, better information systems for less $$$
A NEW ECONOMIC IMPERATIVE
For decades, well established large organizations with robust business models have enjoyed IT budgets of relative plenty. But the slow-down in economic growth of recent years has installed a new economic reality.
The role of IT in organizations has not changed fundamentally – even while operating in a depressed economic period organizations need information systems to fuel process improvements, creative innovation, growth and front-line customer services. What HAS changed fundamentally is the size of IT budgets, probably forever. The world of corporate IT is facing a permanent change in its funding.
To achieve significant cost reductions whilst avoiding direct impact on frontline services and growth, organizations are re-visiting how they run IT and procure services. Decision makers are pressured to inject innovation into procurement approaches and to take marginally more risk where the promise of step-change rewards exists.
Nowhere is the potential for rewards greater or more achievable than in the supply of business software applications that satisfy stakeholder demands to source innovation in information systems, improve the efficiency of processes and inject new ways of engaging with customers and finding new markets.
THE BOTTOM LINE
The total cost of IT for organizations should not exceed 1% of income. For many organizations, a target outline cost for IT in the order of 0.5% of turnover is achievable.
Organizations that have already thoughtfully engineered their IT function, like easyJet in the United Kingdom, can today run their IT operations at a cost that represents less than 1% of total revenues. This compares to the majority of organizations whose IT costs will range from 1.5% to 6% of income. easyJet is profiting from moving its core platforms to cloud computing and adopting Software as a Service solutions for utility applications like email, calendaring and office software.
This paper argues that yet more rewards can be achieved through more thoughtful approaches to IT procurement without significantly increasing risk. For organizations that face more extreme changes to compliance and market conditions, more can be done to deliver adaptive, better-fit IT to proportionately more IT users.
A myopic focus on cost reduction can result in an inward looking culture that ignores the potential to power growth through technology innovation. The potential of IT to create competitive advantage, boost customer service performance and streamline business processes to create operational excellence has taken a knock over the last two decades – but the potential still exists for IT to do just that.
SERVING THE LONG-TAIL
The majority of large enterprise have adopted core platforms for business computing to service the ‘majority need’ for software applications. But a faster pace of change in business markets, the need for greater compliance and control, greater access to data made possible by ‘big data’ technologies and the joint impacts of social networking, consumerism and mobile working have led to greater demands by individuals and communities of users for ‘enterprise-grade’ software applications to meet their ever changing information needs.
In most large enterprises, the majority need for applications is met by a small number (i.e. the top 20%) of enterprise applications. Sourcing and deploying these ‘big wheels’ of enterprise computing architecture – that underpin the core mission-critical processes of the enterprise – has been the focus of enterprise computing for decades. Economies from these deployments come from the adoption of best practice and the consolidation of business operations to shared service centres able to fulfil business needs across the enterprise.
The last decade however has seen an ever growing demand for additional applications to respond to the ever changing needs of individuals and communities. While the net number of users for these applications may be lower, the importance of the information, and the role of these individuals as innovators and change agents in the enterprise, has placed greater pressure on IT and procurement departments to source an ever increasing range of business applications. This demand by smaller numbers of users for higher numbers of applications has become known as the ‘Long-Tail’. In a period when businesses are trying to cut purchase and support costs for IT by reducing numbers of applications, these demands are particularly unhelpful.
Situational applications platforms meet this need by providing a common technology platform able to repeatedly author applications and deliver them to individuals or communities of users in a fraction of the time and at a fraction of the cost of traditional tools. This is made possible by their adoption of codeless authoring and use of ready-to-use templates and design building blocks that negate use of traditional best-of-breed platform tools and coding skills.
The first ever situational application platform was the spreadsheet. Times are changing. Information workers need to deal with much bigger data sets and IT leaders must ensure that data is organized, always-secure and any software application must adhere to necessary standards of governance and compliance. The new generation of situational applications platforms like Encanvas (www.encanvas.com) are engineered to meet ‘IT hygiene standards’ of security, performance and scalability, yet they provide unrivalled self-service tooling to enable web workers to exploit existing systems data.
Encanvas was created 2002 by the founders of NDMC Consulting. The founders believed that business users would seek to work in social groups that would span across and beyond enterprise boundaries and, having experienced this new form of business workplace, key knowledge workers and creative contributors to business processes would seek to be able to author applications for their communities in a form purposely sculptured to the needs of the community of use.
This idea of socially-centric, built-for-purpose and potentially thrown-away software was unknowingly endorsed by technology thought-leader Clay Shirky in his essay ‘Situated Software’ published in March 2004 when he wrote, “Part of the future I believe I’m seeing is a change in the software ecosystem which, for the moment, I’m calling situated software. This is software designed in and for a particular social situation or context. This way of making software is in contrast with what I’ll call the Web School (the paradigm I learned to program in), where scalability, generality, and completeness were the key virtues.”
In August 2007, Luba Cherbakov and a team from IBM wrote the first of two articles on what they described as ‘Situational Applications’.
In their paper titled ‘SOA meets situational applications, Part 1: Changing computing in the enterprise’, Cherbakov and her colleagues defined the attributes of Situational Applications, stating, “The loosely accepted term situational applications describe applications built to address a particular situation, problem, or challenge. The development life cycle of these types of applications is quite different from the traditional IT-developed, SOA-based solution. SAs are usually built by casual programmers using short, iterative development life cycles that often are measured in days or weeks, not months or years. As the requirements of a small team using the application change, the SA often continues to evolve to accommodate these changes. Significant changes in requirements may lead to an abandonment of the used application altogether; in some cases it’s just easier to develop a new one than to update the one in use.
The need for team-based computing in the enterprise is not new. Development of applications by amateur programmers using IBM Lotus® Notes®, Microsoft® Excel spreadsheets in conjunction with Microsoft Access, or other tools is widespread. What’s new in this mix is the impressive growth of community-based computing coupled with an overall increase in computer skills, the introduction of new technologies, and an increased need for business agility. The emergence of Asynchronous JavaScript + XML (Ajax)—which leverages easy access to Web-based data and rich user interface (UI) controls—combined with the Representational State Transfer (REST) architectural style of Web services offers an accessible palette for the assembly of highly interactive browser-based applications.”
The emergence of BIG DATA technologies has led to the rediscovery of the important role of expert situational applications tooling as organizations acknowledge the need to equip analysts and middle-managers with self-service, community-centric applications to assimilate, analyse and act on the actionable insights they’re surfacing.
Nevertheless, situational applications remain a largely misunderstood concept in enterprise computing due to many misguided pre-conceived notions that are now proven to be fatally flawed. These include:
•Applications that can be designed cheaply enough to ‘throw-away’ can’t possibly be expected to meet enterprise data integration, security, performance and tuning expectations.
•It’s not possible to create the critical-mass of building blocks and tooling required to remove the majority of programming overheads.
•Organizations are better off buying best of breed solutions, to then mackle them together.
•There is no competitive advantage to be gained from IT as companies now use the same platforms.
•If players like Microsoft, Google, Oracle and IBM haven’t made it work then it isn’t possible!
CODELESS SITUATIONAL APPLICATIONS PLATFORM TOOLS
Situational Applications represent the MAJORITY of emerging demands for software ‘systems’ beyond the core platform components of Financial and Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems.
Situational Applications Platformsare cloud-based tool-kits that support repeated production of situational applications. Their commercial licensing or rental models presume that organizations will produce a near-infinite number of business applications. They offer an alternative approach for the provision of new applications to serve the long-tail of demand.
Before engaging a procurement process or custom coding development, the majority of ‘systems’ requirements are considered for internal delivery by business analysts embedded into change management teams (and motivated through targeted remuneration packages to improve the process areas they serve).
Situational applications development is performed on software platforms that analysts can use themselves to create applications in consort with stakeholders to support improvements in business processes without having to code or acquire tools and skills that would necessitate an ‘IT project’.
This approach places focus and rewards on process improvement and business outcomes rather than the technology componentry.
Situational Applications offer a practical alternative to custom coding, software procurement or outsourcing.
Benefits of this method:
Project complexity and risk is removed by creating applications during workshops and iteratively adapting applications to best fit the use case.
No programming skills and competencies are needed.
No dependencies exist for middle-ware software or third party tools in areas such as business intelligence, geo-spatial intelligence, forms and database design etc.
New applications are created without additional software costs
No costs associated with browser compatibility testing, applications re-working, de-bugging or performance tuning is incurred.
No version upgrades or maintenance costs are incurred in relation to the applications developed.
KNOWN ROAD-BLOCKS
A series of road-blocks have prohibited innovation in IT procurement approaches to serve the long-tail of demand for software applications. Thanks to developments in the science and application of computing, these roadblocks have now been overcome.
1. Norms of IT buying behavior
Problem: There is a widely held view in business IT procurement circles that ready-built software represents a lower risk than custom-built software. This is mainly because buyers presume projects will require custom programming. Furthermore, IT buyers are pressured to consider outsourcing as a means of offsetting cost without being able to monetize the ‘downside’ of outsourcing strategies, or consider alternative insourcing strategies.
Solution: IT buyers must look beyond accepted sourcing approaches if they are to achieve step-change cost and efficiency benefits made possible by new innovations in computing.
2. Overcoming limitations of Web browsers
Problem: Until very recently it wasn’t possible to provide assurances to corporate IT buyers over the performance, security and usability of applications delivered via web browsers owing to the limitations of operating systems platforms and browsers. The presumption continues to pervade that applications installed on a client or server internally are somehow ‘better’.
Solution: Recent events in the development of web-based computing such as increased competition in the web browser market resulting from Google’s entry, market acceptance of AJAX technology, the release of HTML 5, the launch by Microsoft of Active Server Pages (ASP) 3.5 etc. have collectively made possible the design, deployment and operation of Rich Internet applications in a client server architecture that perform just as well as (if not better than) pre-installed desktop and server software.
3. Project cost and complexity resulting from custom programming
Problem: It is presumed that custom applications can only be developed by custom programming.
Solution: New innovative (so-called ‘codeless’) software like Encanvas Secure&Live facilitates the design, deployment and operation of sophisticated Rich Internet Business Applications without the need for custom programming. Applications are developed by business analysts working closely with stakeholders and users. Applications are designed in workshop environments without the need to programme.
4. Use of multiple development tools
Problem: It is presumed that new applications developments will require multiple separate technology components to discharge the varied functions of a business application – such as database, workflow software, intranet and content management software, reporting and dashboarding (business intelligence) software, mobile computing software, geo-spatial information and mapping software etc. For each of these software tools, unique IT competencies are needed, leading to large project teams and complex projects.
Solution: New codeless software development platforms like Encanvas adopt an approach similar to LEGO® whereby building blocks of technology are ready-made so that applications designers can create new applications with all of the necessary features supplied ‘out-of-the-box’ without custom programming.
5. Dependence on middleware
Problem: When data is held in different systems and in different formats, it has been traditionally very difficult to acquire and return data to and from new software applications. Another presumption therefore exists that it’s not possible to easily acquire and return data to different systems at the same time, or robustly govern the security and organization of data.
Solution: The advent of enterprise mashup technology and services oriented computing has overcome these obstacles. It means that new applications can be rapidly created that re-use data that exists in internal systems or is accessible via the web without compromising security or systems resilience. Products like Encanvas include sophisticated data acquisition, data transformation, data aggregation, data query design and database creation features thereby removing any dependency for middleware tools to exist.
6. Software development project complexity
Problem: Decades of failed IT projects have convinced IT buyers that custom software applications are high risk. IT projects often fail as the result of several associated factors that combine to create complexity:
Organizations have been traditionally required to use many tools to develop software applications.
Use of multiple tools demands multiple competencies; therefore the number of people required for projects swell.
Communications between project outcome specifiers and deliverers break down. Applications are programmed ‘offline’ in backrooms against a design specification that must be authored at a time when it’s difficult (if not impossible) to envision the end solution and whether it will deliver an ROI.
The need for programming (particularly in the area of logic scripts and user interface appearance) leads to large volumes of custom code that is non re-usable yet must be tested for cross-browser compatibility, security, server performance and resilience. This results in a major cost overhead for testing and debugging on any custom project.
Owing to poor communications between project sponsors and deliverers, it’s common for large amounts of re-working and editing of applications to be required amounting to as much as 15% of project total costs.
Solution: In simple terms, demands for custom programming and large number of tools results in project process complexity and poor collaboration between project sponsors and delivers resulting in high project cost, long delivery timeframes, unpredictable ROIs and high risks. The solution to these challenges is to adopt agile design software that business analysts can use to deliver applications without needing to resort to programming and complex IT projects.
AN ENTERPRISE TECHNOLOGY TO POWER PROCESS IMPROVEMENT AND INNOVATION
The internal delivery of situational applications by business analysts (embedded into change teams) presumes the existence of development tools business analysts can master to build, deploy and support robust applications by themselves – without custom coding – in order to embed IT expertise into change teams.
To adopt SITUATIONAL APPLICATIONS DELIVERY three things need to happen:
A codeless platform for situational applications design and delivery should be selected and installed.
Analysts should be trained in situational applications project delivery.
IT procurement ‘norms of behavior’ should consider suitability of situational applications before turning to off-the-shelf software solutions.
These three key steps are described in more detail here:
1. Installing tools
Provision of an integrated applications platform that supports design, deployment and delivery of situational application means that analysts are able perform both design and delivery roles. This bleed of the IT function into change teams dramatically reduces the number of people engaged in IT projects and the level of expertise required of candidates. It dramatically reduces dependencies on internal programming teams and outside consultants.
Organizations like Volkswagen Group have for several years adopted Process Improvement Managers as part of change teams. These individuals are expert IT professionals (traditionally business analysts or IT project programme managers) and possess both an understanding of business processes and technology. Motivated by remuneration plans associated with process improvement targets and achievements, the focus of process improvement managers is to instigate and deliver perpetual improvement in core business processes, rather than simply build applications.
2. Equipping the analysts
For situational applications delivery to be successful, analysts require a common toolset (computing platform) that can design, deploy and operate potentially hundreds of secure and live portal spaces containing hundreds of applications without creating a burden on IT resources or creating performance, security and systems resilience issues.
The economics of the platform must enable applications to be designed and then discarded, modified or sustained without high costs to encourage innovation and the creative use of IT.
It’s important that business software applications can be iteratively designed in real time by analysts working in workshop environments without requiring programming teams or advanced IT programming skills; or the need to work with multiple technology tools that would demand too high a level of skills and competencies for any single person to master application design.
It’s important that the selected software application platform delivers Rich Internet experiences and levels of collaboration now expected of modern applications – a benchmark standard that is guided by the quality of applications offered to consumers by both Apple and Google.
3. IT procurement norms should adapt
Unless IT procurement practises adapt, possibilities for insourcing through situational applications delivery can never be achieved as successive applications requirements are packaged into boxes for procurement without consideration being given to alternative sourcing approaches.