James Taylor's Decision Management

I saw this list of 10 skills developers will need in the next five years - developers not programmers you notice - and I was struck by several things.

First and foremost it still assumed that application developers would be programming - not assembling applications from components, not specifying the behavior of a system in a declarative way but programming. This seems like a major no-no to me. Surely in the next five years application developers will finally realize that declarative and model-driven approaches should replace hard-coding in a procedural language? Using a BPMS to specify workflow and process, a BRMS to specify business logic and a BI tool to specify reports all seem like no-brainers. Why would you code this kind of thing? If you do you are just creating a new generation of legacy applications. Application Development 2.0 is surely called for and a key element in Application Development 2.0 is a focus on declarative.

I was also struck by the absence of analytics from this list. With so much data already in organizations and the volumes/timeliness of this data only increasing, surely developers need to understand the power of analytics to improve systems and decision-making.

I did like the articles focus on soft skills - always key and easy for those of us focused on technology to forget.

In case you missed them, here are three posts addressing the core issue of declarative logic definition:

• Business Rules to Programmers: Methink thou doest protest too much I
• Business Rules to Programmers: Methink thou doest protest too much II
• Business Rules to Programmers: Methink thou doest protest too much III