I usually stay away from such posts, but I can't resist. Check out these two sites:
http://www.zoho.com/
http://services.alphaworks.ibm.com/ManyEyes/
Monday, February 05, 2007
Saturday, February 03, 2007
A priori
A priori is a term that describes sequence of events, time. More specifically, development is a sequence of steps, events, that produce a desired result. The question that bothers me is why does it freaking take so long.
A colleague of mine was recently complaining that his users were upset that it takes his team a long time to develop seemingly simple functionality. Why does it take weeks to read some data, apply some business rules, send some messages, and produce a report.
The world of business tools can be thought of as a giant, ever increasing graveyard. The business tools are being continuously and artificially given life to. Like little Frankensteins, they roam the earth, used and abused by both users and developers, growing up, until being killed off and replaced with a younger Frankensteins that are doomed to the same fate.
Excel is the only tool that comes to mind that has escaped this fate. It allows the business user to solve his own problems. Unthinkable to a crack smoking code monkey. The user can load data, build his models, produce reports, export them out. The power is in the users hands. On the other side, the developer attempts to give the user exactly what the user asked for and nothing, and I mean nothing else. In fact, the majority of the time, the developer neither understands the business user nor the business nor the problem being solved.
I think the industry is starting to realize this and is attempting to shift the power back to the business user. For example, specs like BPEL and the hype surrounding web-services are all meant to give more power to the business user and reduce the turn-around time of development. I believe software will become less like software and more like legos. Individual pieces will still need to be built, but the business user is the one that will put the legos together to produce a result. Things like forms, business rules, reports, data loading, data extraction will go away. Instead, time will be spent on producing richer widgets to do more sophisticated things. Honestly, how many developers does it take to build a relatively large system that does a whole lot of variations of the 5 things mentioned above? 1, 2, 5, 7, 10, 40? How big is your team?
A colleague of mine was recently complaining that his users were upset that it takes his team a long time to develop seemingly simple functionality. Why does it take weeks to read some data, apply some business rules, send some messages, and produce a report.
The world of business tools can be thought of as a giant, ever increasing graveyard. The business tools are being continuously and artificially given life to. Like little Frankensteins, they roam the earth, used and abused by both users and developers, growing up, until being killed off and replaced with a younger Frankensteins that are doomed to the same fate.
Excel is the only tool that comes to mind that has escaped this fate. It allows the business user to solve his own problems. Unthinkable to a crack smoking code monkey. The user can load data, build his models, produce reports, export them out. The power is in the users hands. On the other side, the developer attempts to give the user exactly what the user asked for and nothing, and I mean nothing else. In fact, the majority of the time, the developer neither understands the business user nor the business nor the problem being solved.
I think the industry is starting to realize this and is attempting to shift the power back to the business user. For example, specs like BPEL and the hype surrounding web-services are all meant to give more power to the business user and reduce the turn-around time of development. I believe software will become less like software and more like legos. Individual pieces will still need to be built, but the business user is the one that will put the legos together to produce a result. Things like forms, business rules, reports, data loading, data extraction will go away. Instead, time will be spent on producing richer widgets to do more sophisticated things. Honestly, how many developers does it take to build a relatively large system that does a whole lot of variations of the 5 things mentioned above? 1, 2, 5, 7, 10, 40? How big is your team?
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