Dynamic Applications
What are Dynamic Applications?
It's the software-way of putting the business people back in charge. Today, changes to enterprise business software takes ages to get into production. Endless analyze-redesign-implement-test-deploy cycles affecting multiple stakeholders: IT, QA, vendors and of course the sponsor.
How would it feel if the first three stakeholders could be removed from the process, once the application has been finalized in its initial state? How about giving the sponsor or business department the ability to adapt and change applications on their own? How about giving them the ability to change complex business logic, fine-tune parameters and model work flow to reflect the reality when and as soon as it changes?
It seems to be one of the new hypes going on in the enterprise, as I've found several sources for the "dynamic business applications" keywords. There are some interesting videos on YouTube:
Ten years ago, IBM started with the concept of extracting business logic into business rules, which are then run by an interpreter or rule engine. This took the software development industry a big leap forward, at least in the enterprise software market. Since then, a lot has happened on that particular market of business rules management systems.
At the end of 2008, Forrester Research published their video which shows what I'm talking about here: Dynamic Business Applications. It's about software which is changed by those who do know how it should behave - the business experts.
Of course, this is not new at all. There have been a lot of experiments with expert systems and most of them failed miserable. However, there are a few examples out there which were quite successful:
Excel is one very popular example of an 'expert system'. It's perfect for processing financial data. Assignments, formulas, charts etc. can be modified by the end-users without the need of programmers.
But Excel lacks professionality. It lacks integration with enterprise IT landscapes. It lacks revision safety. It lacks the ability to process large data. (We're talking gigabytes of financial data here) And it lacks the ability to be developed by professional software developers
Dynamic Business Applications target at exactly this point:
Developed by professionals, so the core of the application fits into enterprise environments, can process lots of data, can be maintained over years and is correctly documented. Changed by domain experts after the application has been developed, tested and released to production environment. The changes done by domain experts are what the end-users need and these changes can be made into production in a timely manner.
This is one aspect of Dynamic Applications. There's more to come, stay tuned.
It's the software-way of putting the business people back in charge. Today, changes to enterprise business software takes ages to get into production. Endless analyze-redesign-implement-test-deploy cycles affecting multiple stakeholders: IT, QA, vendors and of course the sponsor.
How would it feel if the first three stakeholders could be removed from the process, once the application has been finalized in its initial state? How about giving the sponsor or business department the ability to adapt and change applications on their own? How about giving them the ability to change complex business logic, fine-tune parameters and model work flow to reflect the reality when and as soon as it changes?
It seems to be one of the new hypes going on in the enterprise, as I've found several sources for the "dynamic business applications" keywords. There are some interesting videos on YouTube:
- Forrester Research: Dynamic Business Applications: Making It Real
- Innovations: Implementing Dynamic Applications
- Tom Debevoise: Business Rules in Business Process Modelling
- Volker Grossmann: How to Manage Business Rules with Eclipse
- BEA: The Beginning of Business I Define
Ten years ago, IBM started with the concept of extracting business logic into business rules, which are then run by an interpreter or rule engine. This took the software development industry a big leap forward, at least in the enterprise software market. Since then, a lot has happened on that particular market of business rules management systems.
At the end of 2008, Forrester Research published their video which shows what I'm talking about here: Dynamic Business Applications. It's about software which is changed by those who do know how it should behave - the business experts.
Of course, this is not new at all. There have been a lot of experiments with expert systems and most of them failed miserable. However, there are a few examples out there which were quite successful:
Excel is one very popular example of an 'expert system'. It's perfect for processing financial data. Assignments, formulas, charts etc. can be modified by the end-users without the need of programmers.
But Excel lacks professionality. It lacks integration with enterprise IT landscapes. It lacks revision safety. It lacks the ability to process large data. (We're talking gigabytes of financial data here) And it lacks the ability to be developed by professional software developers
Dynamic Business Applications target at exactly this point:
Developed by professionals, so the core of the application fits into enterprise environments, can process lots of data, can be maintained over years and is correctly documented. Changed by domain experts after the application has been developed, tested and released to production environment. The changes done by domain experts are what the end-users need and these changes can be made into production in a timely manner.
This is one aspect of Dynamic Applications. There's more to come, stay tuned.
