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Businesspeople have long-standing and deep-seated dissatisfaction with most current business software applications because they are too expensive to purchase, install and maintain, too inflexible, don’t address processes that cross business functions, and don’t match business requirements. |
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Workplaces are dynamic and businesspeople require a strong measure of control over the evolution of their workspaces (and hence their business application software). |
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Businesspeople see technology as a means of growing their businesses and gaining operational efficiencies. |
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Businesspeople have been searching for agile approaches to software applications and IT architectures for years.
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Businesspeople need information technology and collaboration tools that minimize management and maintenance costs, scalability and integration issues.
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Businesspeople need to be at the center of the design process. “Build-for-change” requirements should place the most likely business changes at the center of the application’s design, including its interface to change process and business rules without programming. And the best way to accommodate business change is to give businesspeople the tools and services to create situational enhancements and modifications, including the ability to easily add “add-on” modules without needing any technical skills. |
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Wherever possible, businesspeople should be empowered to define, configure, launch, modify and enhance their own business applications to meet their own business needs, as and when their business needs change, with minimal involvement of IT professionals. |
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Businesspeople need technology that’s competitively priced and value-for-money; they will go with technology providers that deliver the proven best value for their businesses. |
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Businesspeople should be enabled to outsource the major part of their IT infrastructure (e.g. servers and storage devices), eliminate up-front IT costs, pay only for what they use, and yet also enjoy enhanced business application flexibility and responsiveness. |
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Brand leadership and brand loyalty are rapidly diminishing factors in technology purchasing decisions. |
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The application software environment will be dominated by the catalytic convergence of three major emerging technology trends, (i) Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), (ii) Software as a Service (SaaS), and (iii) Dynamic Business Applications (DBA). |
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SOA, SaaS and DBA will shift account control from a world where the packaged application vendors have the largest degree of account control to a new, hybrid world in which businesses will define themselves by their effective deployment of these strategic technologies.
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SOA, SaaS and DBA will better equip businesses with the tools to provide strategic capabilities and flexibility to help drive corporate strategy, and better enable required internal and external services, including mash-ups, to be provided in a changing business environment.
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SaaS providers should be front-runners in providing an architecture open to SOA and DBA, thus enabling businesses to easily extend their application systems and cost-effectively streamline business processes.
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Economic necessity in conjunction with emerging technologies and the need for competitive responsiveness will encourage businesses, from the smallest to the largest, to look for new and low-cost ways to replace their current inflexible, expensive business applications with applications capable of quickly and efficiently meeting “design-for-people” and “build-for-change” requirements. |
