-- Dennis Byron
The Insider's Guide to Business and IT Agility
The Insider's Guide to Business and IT Agility
-- Dennis Byron
TrackBack URL: http://www.ebizq.net/MT4/mt-tb.cgi/15766
Business process management and optimization -- philosophies, policies, practices, and punditry.
Peter Schooff is Forum Editor and frequent blogger for ebizQ. Peter can be reached at peter@ebizq.net
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That's right, the blog post about is intentionally blank. I have no easy answer to my own question, "What do situational applications have to do with business process management (BPM)?"
That's because I thought I had situational apps figured out until I saw a good discussion among Jon Pyke, Phil Wainright and others over on the ebizQ Forum.
I thought of situational apps more as mashups of other apps and applets before I read the Focus discussion. I definitely did not think they were only developed out in the cloud. (There should never be a distinction between what you can do in the cloud and what you can do on premise, especially in terms of BPM.) But now I think there may actually be a difference between situational applications and all other previously identified app species.
Typically applications are divided on one dimension as enterprise/collaborative (groupware)/personal-productivity/consumer or on another dimension as transactional/analytic or on another as consumer/industrial/commercial/technical. The differences involve looking at them by role, function or legal description of primary user enterprise.
Wikiepedia defines situational application as "software created for a small group of users with specific needs" and typically having "a short life span." Oh yeah, like that COBOL payroll program that Harry wrote for Joe's Print Shop in 1972 that is still chugging away every Thursday 35 years later. Despite saying situational apps have a short life span, Wikipedia also says such an app "continues to evolve to accommodate" changes. OK, Harry's COBOL program really is a situational app.
So that's the good news. Whether a codeset is an app, or an applet, or a mash-up--situational or non-situational--then BPM software can integrate it into a process flow.
-- Dennis Byron
Dennis - I have a web site devoted to "situational applications". See www.PowerInTheCloud.com
I also just published a book on situational applications that may be of interest.
My definition of a sit app is:
A good enough application built to quickly respond to a particular situation, problem, or challenge.
A situational business process would be a good enough business process built to quickly respond to a particular situation, problem, or challenge.
To me, a situational business process is a "situational application in motion". It can often involve multiple situational applications strung together in a process using a tool like TheProcessFactory or even the workflow tools in Force.com.
The key characteristics of a situational solution are:
1. They are "good enough" - no time is wasted on trying to make it pretty or scalable or high performance, etc.
2. They are developed and deployed quickly. This is where a cloud platform comes in. There is no need to procure hardware, or be concerned with authentication and security etc - all these things are built into the platform and you can build and deploy immediately.
3. They address a very specific problem or group of people. There is no attempt to try generalize the solution. It screams "we built this for you and only you". Of course, when you build software this way, it is much faster to do.
Note that how long the application lasts, or how many people use it are not important characteristics of a sit app, despite what Wikipedia says :-).