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.
