Introduction

Today’s business software is in a rut. Customers aren’t happy, despite collectively spending hundreds of billions of dollars each year. What’s more, penetration of software automation in the small and medium sized business (SMB) space is trivial. More business is done in semi-permanent spreadsheets than in any sort of an efficient, automated way.

In this economy, CIOs are often limited by resources and cannot support the change required to truly meet the needs of business. This lack of understanding of the need for IT to maintain control and manage complexity results in a strong desire to try and avoid having to deal with IT at all, whenever possible.

The statistics support these observations; for every dollar proposed, most companies spend five dollars to make a piece of software actually work, and only about 1/3 of projects are successful. Approximately 1/3 of software projects fail after significant investment.

Almost no organization is happy with their software. Something must change.

Value Drivers

There are a number of key factors that will drive the vision for software’s future espoused by this paper.

  1. Ordered List ItemEmpowering the available workforce for any given project by allowing 1000 analysts, business users and spreadsheet guru’s to do what only one (1) trained developer could have done before in a typical company. With this, there is a sizeable increase in efficiency (the business team can directly impact their software) and reduction in labor costs.
  2. A reduction of as much as 90% in software “development” costs
  3. A reduction of as much as 90% in software “development” times
  4. Enabling increasingly agile automation, and therefore increasingly agile organizations
  5. The growing expectation of automation by employees resulting in ever increasing numbers of application requests
  6. The weak penetration of software automation today
  7. The increase in regulatory requirements that require IT oversight; HIPPA, SOX, state privacy acts, and more.
  8. The constant need to deliver more IT services with fewer resources

What Types of Applications are we Talking About?

For purposes of this paper, we will divide IT application infrastructure into two camps; Core and Non-Core. Core applications represent those mainline applications that touch most or all departments of an organization. They are often referred to as “ERP” type applications, although they may actually have different names depending on the industry.

Non-Core applications are all those applications that live between the individual desktop and the core applications. They may touch a few users, an entire department, or they may span several departments. Quite frequently, they are integrated with other core and non-core applications.

Non-Core applications are commonly produced on tools like .NET, MS Access, spreadsheets, miscellaneous web development languages, FoxPro, and more.

Most organizations, large or small, have a limited number of core applications. However, large organizations can have hundreds and even thousands of non-core applications.

We will discuss Core and Non-Core applications in SMB’s, but only considering Non-Core applications in larger organizations. This is because large organization core infrastructure, once put in place, is not likely to change for a very long time.

What is a “Fifth Generation Language” (5GL)?

A 5GL is an environment to build sophisticated applications, akin to what one would build by “writing code”; only the building is done without the traditional concepts of code. There are two requirements:

  1. Ordered List ItemThe platform must be able to replace a traditional development language, but still enable the same level of desired results.
  2. If it requires a software programmer, it’s not a 5GL. But, if it only requires a “power user” or, for example, a typical office application, then it may be a 5GL.

The Vision: A “Platform” Approach Will Solve Most of Today’s Problems

The future of software is to have a “glue” platform that is used universally throughout an organization to make it fast and easy to create new applications or to integrate with existing software functionality. All applications are either built natively on the platform or integrated to it.

For example, you have a department with advanced needs involving an external silo of functionality, such as currency conversion. They select a 3rd party service and connect to it. Then they add the additional internal process surrounding the service and roll it out. It takes merely a few days to deploy. Central IT maintains the systems, policies, and audit the software without having to deal with the constantly evolving business department needs unless they deem it strategically important to do so.

Cloud Computing (web-based) Platform as a Service (PaaS) has the potential to make this work, although there are very few vendors that provide 5th generation language (5GL) capability necessary to empower the larger numbers of business users.

The value drivers of this vision are material increases in organizational productivity coupled with substantial reduction in IT costs.

Key characteristics required to implement this future are:

  • Unordered List ItemRobust Software Development Lifecycle Tools (used non-programmatically)
  • Application Portability - ability to extract, replicate, merge/compare functionality and support version control
  • Server Portability - completely open for deployment on any cloud infrastructure, public or private
  • 5GL development tools - ability for non-programmers to produce sophisticated functionality
  • Robust Systems Administration tools (non-programmatic) to maintain all aspects of underlying servers
  • Multiple methods of integration and exposure of data via web services, API, ftp and other methods. The web services and ftp methods do not require a programmer to implement.

This promises a vision where software functionality is easy and affordable to produce. It enables deep penetration of software automation inside the organization. It functions as the “glue” that ties together 3rd party functionality silos such as shipping, purchasing, geo data and much more.

Benefits of This Platform-Based Vision

The benefits of this approach outline a way for businesses to take hold of their operational and portal software to make it work for rather than against them. A PaaS is a secure cloud computing solution that provides increased control, ability to enforce security, simplification of auditing, reduction in complexity, additional service delivery, and excellent support. These benefits are compounded by the platform’s ability to reduce risk of non-core applications and provide more efficient and nimble business operations.

→ Increased Service Delivery

Using a PaaS, organizations can cut feature delivery time by as much as 90%. In so doing, they enable their business units to be more efficient and more adaptable. This type of increased Service Delivery means much deeper penetration of software functionality in an organization, which, in turn, dramatically impacts both the top and bottom lines.

Additionally, a 5GL PaaS means that the organization can empower thousands of business analysts, web guru’s and spreadsheet experts to do the application “development” themselves, relieving significant burden from IT.

→ Increased Control

Using a PaaS, organizations can take control of their diverse software infrastructure. They can eliminate rogue applications, provide usage metering by department or other parameter, centralize network infrastructure and centralize disaster recovery.

→ Ability to Enforce Security

A PaaS can provide encryption of privacy data and give administrators the ability to track logins and sensitive data access.

→ Simplification of Auditing

A PaaS allows for monitoring of privacy data or SOX related fields across all applications, provides the capability to require key field types to be “auditable” and track their edit history and offers quick reporting on all auditable fields. Regardless of who built the applications, the IT department can quickly run audit reports against them all.

→ Sizeable Reduction in Complexity

With a PaaS, users can build on one platform what might otherwise take hundreds of different applications. This is critical because it means a common frame of reference for all support calls, and a common language.

A 5GL PaaS makes it much easier for anyone to pick up and support a pre-existing application because the tools are far easier to learn. There aren’t thousands of lines of code to pour through, or new tools to learn…it’s the same tool set as is used for the hundreds of other applications in the organization. Best of all, the business unit can be asked to support the application themselves.

The robust platform also provides end users consistent interfaces between applications, making it far easier for users of one application to learn how to use a new one.

How Close is this Vision to Reality?

The ability to implement this vision exists today. There are tools in existence that have demonstrated each of the core characteristics for implementation as described above. The market is still in an early adoption phase, however, and has not yet embraced these concepts except on smaller scales.

About WorkXpress Platform as a Service (PaaS)

WorkXpress is the world’s most functional PaaS without programming (5GL). This cloud based software solution provides better software, faster application deployments and more features than other PaaS competitors and at a lower price point. The platform offers non-programmers the ability to create limitless sophisticated business applications using five building blocks in an intuitive, drag and drop, point-and-click, secure, web-based environment. WorkXpress eliminates the need for coding, data modeling and database querying, while automating common systems administration tasks like maintenance or disaster recovery. These capabilities are all possible without purchase of additional hardware or software.

WorkXpress has demonstrated these capabilities with customers for over 5 years, boasting highly successful implementations with happy customers.

old/5gl.txt · Last modified: 2016/09/14 18:19 (external edit)
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