Trends Report

The Dynamic Business Applications Imperative

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

September 24th, 2007
John Rymer, null
John Rymer
Connie Moore, null
Connie Moore
With contributors:
Sharyn Leaver , Mike Gilpin , Catherine Salzinger , Katie Smillie , Tom Pohlmann

Summary

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 evolves 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.

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Forrester helps business and technology leaders use customer obsession to accelerate growth. That means empowering you to put the customer at the center of everything you do: your leadership strategy, and operations. Becoming a customer-obsessed organization requires change — it requires being bold. We give business and technology leaders the confidence to put bold into action, shaping and guiding how to navigate today's unprecedented change in order to succeed.