James Taylor's Decision Management

As the summer doldrums roll on I thought I would try and stir things up a little with a "2.0" post - specifically some thoughts on a software stack for "Application Development 2.0". Such a stack would:

• Model processes, events and decisions as first class objects
• Support declarative (rules-based) approaches to developing business logic
• Use visual metaphors to manage rules, processes, events
• Integrate analytics and dashboards directly
• Develop rich visual interfaces
  
• Support legacy modernization, legacy integration and legacy understanding
• Support collaboration, especially collaboration between IT professionals and business users
  
• Contain tools that do version control, configuration management, approvals, deployments etc. in a way that makes sense to business users and that integrate well with IT's tools for these activities

Business analysis are going to become more and more important in application development and business users themselves are going to insist on being part of the process. The days when programmers got to work on their stuff without non-technical participation are gone. Business analysts will take more and more responsibility for both the overall application strategy and the development of composite applications from existing components. They will increasingly prototype new components and work with programmers to evolve prototypes into production-ready components and with business users to evolve the behavior of those components.

Bottom line, Application Development 2.0 means that application development tools will increasingly have to shift their focus to business users and analysts so that non-programmers can be brought into the process.