Custom app dev is DEAD. Long live the Agile Business Platforms.

Custom application development is dead. Over the next 3 years Agile Business Platforms development like force.com and Mendix will replace custom development for 90% of business applications. The ability to rapidly prototype business requirements and deploy scalable, working applications in a fraction of the time of traditional Enterprise application development processes is a game-changing business advantage. No one who understands the ROI and business value benefit will hire a Java or .Net developer to build a new business application from scratch. Anyone looking to reduce costs and improve business agility by reinventing their legacy systems needs to look at a tool like Mendix that can deliver immediate business applications and continuous Agile business improvements.

The traditional 2- or 3-year Enterprise application development process run in the traditional way by the IT team is a waste of money and time and sacrifices key business agility. In today's hyper competitive and fast moving world, no business can afford to wait that long to introduce new capabilities, integrate with new supply chain partners, or automate existing costly manual processes. Agility, flexibility, and lower cost are the name of the game.

These Agile Business Platforms can be either on-premise of cloud based Platforms-as-a-Service (PaaS) options. The key is to be able to have a business analyst sit with users and business people and turn requirements in to prototypes immediately. This way the business people can "touch and feel" the application and see how their business process will work. They can provide feedback and iterate through processes, problems, and ideas in a matter of days not months. This is the definition of an Agile business and it is the promise of on-demand IT services that require a minimum of custom coding and maintenance. The companies who embrace and benefit from these cloud platforms will be able to out innovate and out compete their competitors by trying new business ideas, improving business processes, and leveraging the global supply chain of partners to produce the best products, services, and customer experience. IT must be the enabler, not the bottleneck to this true Business Agility.

Long live the new Agile Business Platforms.

Iterative Development Key for New Product Development

There is a lot of discussion about Agile vs. Plan Driven software development methodologies - usually driven by advocates of one or the other. Certainly, it's a more complex topic and there is a wide spectrum of extremely structured, plan-driven approaches to extremely agile, change embracing approaches. One well thought-out and nuanced explanation with advice for choosing where on the continuum to try to be can be found here.

Two concepts are fairly easy to accept and understand - one is that when you need to coordinate many different parties a more planned approach with more formal communication between the parties is essential. This comes in to play when coordinating marketing campaigns, customer roll-outs, contracts with vendors, and corporate funding approval processes. In all of these cases you need to have an idea of how long an effort will take and how much it will cost - and all of the stakeholders involved need to be formally updated to changes in the overall timeline or cost . This can form the basis of the overall planned Program at a high level.

The second is that at a lower level of detail, and especially with new product development, it is impossible to formally plan the software development with any degree of accuracy regarding how long each feature will take or whether every scalability and performance metric will be achieved by the first, second, or third attempt. Additionally, the new product development implementation process is really a R&D process, not a defined engineering approach. You need to explore whether customers can understand the new product, whether the new UI makes sense, whether the most anticipated features are actually used, and on and on. As part of your new product conceptualization, you need to prototyp, build, and let customers work with the software to learn what is really needed in the product. Josh Green, the CEO of Panjiva, explained it well during his presentation at the Information Industry Summit this week:

When we showed Panjiva to our first customers, we expected them to be blown away - we were giving them more data, more easily to use than they ever had before. But they kept asking for more data or asking for the data to be shown differently. After a while I realized that my customers were TEACHING US HOW THE PRODUCT SHOULD REALY WORK!

This is the essential point about truly new product development - it is an exploration. No one can completely specify in advance how the product should be implemented. Users will teach you how to make the software better. But users can only teach you when they react to something that you put in front of them. Iterative development, and especially early prototyping and mock-ups are key to enabling this customer feedback loop. It is imperative to learn from your customers and deliver the next version quickly so that they continue to see the improvements and continue to help you make your product better.

At the same time, you probably need a Program level plan - how much funding do you have? How many iterations can you afford? What conferences or industry events make sense to demo your software at?

So you see, it's not always either Planned or Agile, it's often "both."

The Best Tool for the Job

I spent some time this month learning more about the LexisNexis Data Analytics Supercomputer (or HPCC) system. This is a great tool for building and deploying lightning fast Content Services with high quality content enrichment to turn commodity content in to a valuable information product that professionals will pay for. It's purpose built by a team of very smart technologists who have been turning out content-based products for a long time. For re-engineering a large scale data processing system with hundreds or thousands of input files running on a variety of maxed out Unix servers or mainframes HPCC is a great fit.

The system design reminded me a lot of the notion that when you are doing something over and over again, the right approach is not to just get better and faster at repeating the specific task - but to find a better tool to eliminate the task. If you're a professional carpenter and putting in a lot of nails you may be tempted to look for a better hammer. The best hammer money can buy will certainly help you hammer in nails better. And that hammer will feel great - like an extension of your arm. It will have perfect balance and enable you to bang in nails all day long without feeling tired. You could be recognized as a true black belt hammering expert able to pound on those nails as long as anyone.

But if you spend the time to find & use a better tool (or even invent a new tool) -- say a nail gun! -- you won't be 5% or 10% faster at hammering - you won't be hammering at all. For the first hour the new nail gun will feel klunky, the tool will be inelegant and ungainly compared to that perfectly balanced hammer you're used to. You may resist because the hammer you're used to has worked so well for so long - you can't count how many hours you've used it to bang in the same nail over and over and over again.

But once you grok the new nail gun and get to used to the new way of accomplishing your task you'll see how much faster the new tool lets you put in nails. In fact, you'll be so fast at putting in nails, you'll stop measuring how long it takes to put in a nail and start thinking about the fact that you're 1,000% faster at putting up wood framing, which is the actual goal. This insightful leap requires you to realize that continuing down your existing path and perfecting your use of your current tool is not the best approach - optimization will not win over innovation.

In software development we are blessed that it is so easy to become 5 or 10% more productive. There is always a new trick to learn, always a new pattern to understand, always one more tip for a language to master, always a faster hotkey or way to do that same task again with fewer clicks, always a piece of code to copy & paste from a previous module or an internet example, always a faster way to repeat the same solution from yesterday over again today. Hmm... maybe "blessed" should really be "cursed".

And maybe the real blessing is that it is also very feasible to invent or find completely new approaches and new tools that make ourselves orders of magnitude more productive - to deliver more business value. The key is to recognize when using a new tool will not just save a few minutes here and there, but will actually save weeks or months of effort!

If you're working on an information supply chain that is processing terabytes of content or billions of rows of data, the LexisNexis DAS system and the ECL language is definitely one of those orders of magnitude improvement tools. It may take a while to stop thinking about SQL and good old RDBMS design, but once you get used to the power of your new nail-gun, you love it!