A resolution to bridge the digital divide

I wanted to make a mark in this software defined world, which prompted me to look for options. Then I started asking myself – build, buy or sell?

As I started diving even further into this topic, I was astounded by how much impact software was making in each and every field. At the same time, I was also worried about the disintegration of large enterprise grade software applications.

This Forbes article indicates that on average, 508 applications are used in an enterprise environment and many of these applications are not even bought by IT.

As per the research done by Netskope, 90% of these apps are bought by business users (and not IT). That is a considerable disintegration of the functions that were traditionally performed by large scale enterprise apps.

The proliferation of software applications presents another interesting challenge. How does one bring it all together and make a cohesive solution for the end user?

There were once days when we were worried about holding together a behemoth software like SAP or ORACLE ERP. Now, we are breaking our requirements into smaller needs and investing in hundreds of small software applications and we are still struggling to hold it all together. More importantly, according to the aforementioned research, 88% of these apps do not even meet “enterprise readiness.” So the agony persists.

I realized that the more applications we are buying the more manual work we are creating. The tasks that one has to perform in between these applications are dynamic and are creating further manual processes.

So while we have these powerful applications, we are still wasting time to integrate them. Above all, we are wasting a lot of money to manage all this intricate web of software mess. The software maintenance cost, whether it is licensed software or subscription based, is substantial – ranging from 15% to 20% of the license cost and in subscription model it is baked into the subscription cost.

If one is building software applications to take care of custom needs that the COTS applications are not able to meet, then the cost is fairly prohibitive. As per the research here the average cost to build an application is $270,000 – that is just for one app; an enterprise needs tens of these, if not hundreds.

I put my basic requirements in one of the estimation tools – Otreva - and came up with a projected cost of $261,120 (refer below). And I thought that is fairly reasonable as I remember charging a customer, in my previous avatar, around this number for a pretty basic mobile application with limited features.

If a developer costs, on the lower end, around $90,000 then the overall cost to an enterprise is double of that, i.e. $180,000, considering all the benefits and overheads. It takes on an average 8 to 12 months to design, build, test, integrate and roll out an application and it involves the time of several developers/parties. In light of this, the above estimate is not far off.

 And believe me this is just the start. As you continue to build applications, you establish an entire kingdom to support, maintain and integrate these applications.

Now let’s consider changes. In 1981, Barry Boehm published his book “Software Engineering Economics” and presented the Cost of Change Curve, which showed the cost of change in a software increases exponentially as software development progresses through the stages of requirements, design, code, test and production.

We have made quite a bit of progress in the way we accomplish software development today, including the Agile Methodology, which promises to flatten this curve. However, we are still saddled with the cost of changes and the bigger this kingdom of software mess the bigger is this challenge.

Is there a way to build applications cost effectively and also take care of these in between monsters –documents flow, approvals, tasks, dynamic changes, standardization etc.?

And this is where an old friend introduced me to Business Process Management Suite and more importantly Intelligent Business Process Management Suite (iBPMS) of applications and platforms.

I was surprised to explore the power of these new breed of intelligent applications – they took care of process automation, application development, modernization of legacy infrastructure, Internet-of-things (yes I know! more to come on this) and then the “in-between monsters,” as highlighted above. All of this while presenting a no-programming interface that allows one to create a software empire with a simple click and configure interface.

Now this made a lot of sense. So one platform can help create applications, build workflows and manage all the peripheral items. And one can accomplish this without hiring a bunch of developers skilled in multitude of technologies. How cool is that?

And these suites of applications are built outside in – i.e. you start with a GUI, whether it is a process modeler or a form designer and pretty much do not touch the code. So if you are required to make changes in between or late in the stage, then it just a matter of changing the process diagram or making a change in the forms. That changes the change management structure and the speed at which one can deploy these changes.

Look around you. There are so many manual tasks that you could automate –

• Do you see spreadsheets flying back and forth?
• Are you walking up to another desk to get an approval?
• What about documents or artifacts, are you pinging people for updates, are you waiting on reports?
• Are you consolidating what your teammates are sending you?
• Are your vendors/suppliers outside the system?
• Does your COTS application not handle certain custom processes?
• Have you wondered if only you had access to a few skilled developers – HTML, JAVA, SQL, Greek and Latin developers – and all this pain would have just vanished long time back?
• Are you still working with archaic, clunky and non-user friendly legacy systems but do want to throw it out yet?

The answers to these questions and the accompanying revelation paved my way into BPM. If you haven’t looked at this field recently then you should – I am sure you will emerge a more enlightened person.

Let’s untangle this software mess. I believe 2016 is the year when we make a significant progress in bridging this digital divide. Let me know your experiences and thoughts...