For CIOs (Length: 28 pages)

September 24, 2007

The Dynamic Business Applications Imperative

The Principles Of "Design For People, Build For Change" Will Anchor A New Generation Of Business Applications

by John R. Rymer, Connie Moore

with Tom Pohlmann, Mike Gilpin, Sharyn C. Leaver, Catherine Salzinger, Katie Smillie

Executive Summary (This is a document excerpt)

Most business applications are too inflexible to keep pace with the businesses they support. Today's applications force people to figure out how to map isolated pools of information and functions to their tasks and processes, and they force IT pros to spend too much budget to keep up with evolving markets, policies, regulations, and business models. IT's primary goal during the next five years should be to invent a new generation of enterprise software that adapts to the business and its work and evolve with it. Forrester calls this new generation Dynamic Business Applications, emphasizing close alignment with business processes and work (design for people) and adaptability to business change (build for change). At this stage, the requirements for Dynamic Business Applications are clearer than the design practices needed to create them. But the tools are at hand, and pioneers in service-oriented architecture (SOA), business process management (BPM), and business rules — including independent software vendors (ISVs) — have begun showing us the way. The time to start on this journey is now.