A couple of things picked my interest lastly: first a post from Judith
Hurwitz titled: "Will packaged applications sink under their own weight? Five recomendations for change" (isn't the answer obvious though? :-) ) ; second, a report published by Connie Moore (Forrester) on "Drive
BPM Initiatives to Higher Business Value" (free after registration).
I felt these two articles reflected well the irreversible change brought by SaaS and Cloud Computing. Judith reported that she knows a CIO who spent an insane amount of money on their ERP implementation:
He was in charge of the IT organization in a relatively large corporation [that] had decided to replace its assortment of corporate business applications with a comprehensive ERP system. The idea was correct – the company needed a system that would implement business process and best practices to support the business in a uniform and efficient manner. The problem, in my mind was two fold – first the cost. To purchase and then implement this software cost the company $500 million dollars. Obviously, a considerable part of this expense was for professional services. And maybe that is the point. The idea that a company can purchase a packaged ERP system that is really packaged software is a misnomer. [...] It required a lot more customization than anyone had anticipated. The promise of out of the box implementation was a myth. Once the customization was applied to this package, the concept of a packaged environment was gone. Therefore, it should not have come as a shock when the next time the base platform of processes and tools had to be upgraded; it cost the company an additional $50 million.
Connie's report echoes some of these antiquated enterprise practices that will not survive the SaaS wave. I actually like her report a lot, it presents very succinctly what you must do to be successful at BPM. This is great stuff and I recommend reading it, but at the same time, it extends Judith observations and emphasizes what is wrong with current Enterprise practices: all that IT does is heavy and slow and eventually kills any opportunity to deliver value, even if on paper everyone, be it an ERP vendor, or a BPM Center of Excellence offers a great story. This is where IT is today in a pre-SaaS world. With the current economic situation, these practices are all but a thing of the past.
So what does Judith recommends:
- Business best practices should be component based
- Create standards based links
- Separate business rules from code
- Implementations should be configurable
- Modularity is the key
I could not agree more with Judith, even though I'd like to add a few more elements:
- Plan on the short term: any IT projects longer that a few hundreds man.days is doomed to fail;
- Leverage Web 2.0 and Collaboration;
- Leave Operations and Management problems to someone else
Judith continues:
I predict that we are entering a new stage of evolution of software. Many of the CIOs I have spoken with lately are beginning to rethink the conventional wisdom about packaged applications. They are beginning to take the concept of business services that is the foundation of a service
oriented architecture and applying that to the packaging of codified best practices.
Yes, this is also what we believe at RunMyProcess, there is definitely a market for SaaS (CRM, HR...), but there is a broader market for a combination of process-centric Platform-as-a-Service which are capable of consuming and assembling Judith's business services/components into meaningful and dedicated processes. RunMyProcess supports a strong level of configurability and modularity.
But that's not all, SaaS and PaaS are not just about a better software delivery model; their paramount value is to encourage lighter practices from a people, process and technology perspectives, because the required technical skills are much lower, infrastructure and environments are managed by
third parties and overall implementation, test, deployment and operation processes are a lot simpler thanks to model-driven, Web 2.0 and often
standards-based tools. If we look at Connie's BPM Capability Maturity Model, RunMyProcess can help you reach level 3 as soon as you deploy your first process in production, i.e. a few weeks, and level 4 within 3 months.
This is the PaaS advantage.
