IT complexity is one of businesses biggest competitors. It negatively impacts business agility and stifles business strategy, resulting in the inability to deliver new products, and or reducing or avoiding costs in a timely manner. Much of the complexity comes from old legacy applications that quite frankly should have been retired years ago. Applications like these are changed at your peril creating risk, and changed only by experienced specialists costing higher than needed salaries. Often these old applications reside on old hardware technologies again creating their own set of annoyances.

IT Complexity Issues

Some of you may have gone down the monolithic enterprise system route and discovered new levels of complexity and costs. These typically, are changed no more than three or four times a year purely due to their complexity.

The agile methodology is supposed to be an answer. Albeit useful in these situations it does not remove complexity, but just helps manage it a little bit.

On top of these issues, and difficult to comprehend in the current austerity times, are IT skill shortages, but alas that is what are the forecasts are stating. So soon it will be a case of managing complexity with fewer resources.

As a CIO you may have offloaded these issue and use offshore resources. Stop kidding yourself the complexity and lack of agility is still there and another issue kicks in that of additional communications issues.

Second Generation Business Process Management, a Way Forward

There is not a complete answer for you today, but suggest keeping an eye out for the second generation business process management (BPM) solutions that combine workflows, business rules and applications development in a single framework. Don’t pick one if they store code, because, as soon as they do, you still have code you didn’t write to manage and that’s never good and nor does this enhance agility. Pick one that generates code at execution time and then gets rid of it. Why? Because if it is not code, it is data and anyone can change data. Better still anyone can change anytime, permissions granted of course. The resource is not only cheaper but there is much more available. Not only is it cheaper, but these solutions ramp up productivity by multiples.

Second generation business process management solutions graphically draw the business processes, and provide tools to optimise them. Second generation solution facilitates your choice of notation, so you can use the Business Process Management Notation (BPMN) is you wish, but would guess business people prefer much simpler notations, also offered by these tools. Apart from the process designers being graphically built, business rules can be added graphically as well making corporate standards easy to use.

If a business object is not already in the solution, by just pointing and clicking the application plus all the application maintenance forms are dynamically built. These cover all the needs for unstructured processes and case management. All that is left is to draw your business processes and watch as the workflows web forms are also built dynamically now covering all the structured, unstructured and case management processing needs. The second generation tools also let you add usability to the web forms should fine tuning be desired. Even this is not stored as code, but as metadata, so if you further enhance your process the usability changes remain.

You are now well into agility with the ability to allow continuous process improvements.

Note, I have not mentioned integration to legacy applications. Of course, second generation business process management solutions provide all the functionality to integrate, but I suggest you work out if it is quicker to replace the legacy system and let these new tools generate a new solution or to code integrations.

Even for new bespoke application development, second generation business process management web form designers will ramp up productivity by several factors using lower skilled resources, and radically changing the agility as not code is stored.

Many CIOs will be reluctant to move to the cloud, but they should not worry. They can play safe and choose of second generation business process management solution that works in both cloud and on premises. That way they can move migrate anyway which way you want, without changing applications.

Summary

Those that address IT complexity with second generation business process management will reduce and avoid costs making them more competitive. They will also bring new products and services to market quicker, taking market share. Businesses that keep IT complexity are putting their businesses at risk. New entrants to markets that have true agility from the start partly because they are smaller as well offer a threat to many large enterprises. The time to act is now.