OutSystems came to my attention at the Forrester IT Forum as they were suggested as a tool with good support for what Forrester calls Dynamic Business Applications. Founded in 2001 they have 100+ customers mostly in Portugal and the Netherlands but increasingly also in the US. Of these they identify 17 existing customers that have [...]

There was more discussion in the blogosphere about the James McGovern COBOL is Evil post - COBOL is not evil, but COBOL programmers are. Now I already posted a response to James’ post (Why don’t you replace COBOL with something useful - not Java) but this new post made me think. I should say that [...]

Joe McKendrick in his Eye on the Enterprise blog had a post on legacy modernization - Time to Cut COBOL from Life Support in which he referenced a post by James McGovern The mainframe is not evil, but COBOL is… in which James says
that there’s no reason why aging COBOL apps can’t be replaced with [...]

When it’s a dashboard.
I often hear people talk about fighter pilots as a model for the future of business users. For instance, Ade McCormack did in his book on the IT value stack. Indeed this is such a good mental image that many companies use it - either to promote their products or to talk [...]

Colin Tuebner wrapped up with a session on BPM and change management. The presentation is based on a set of interviews with those customers using BPM a while and doing a good job at managing process change. The theme is “Organizations use different patterns for controlling change; choose yours and don’t let change manage you.” [...]

I can’t blog this session live as John Rymer and Mike Gualtieri have asked me to participate. What follows is a combination of thoughts based on the presentation and post-presentation notes.
The theme of the presentation is that “The next frontier in business process management (BPM) and business rules is automating decisions within business processes”. If [...]

I’m going to be on stage with Mike Gualtieri soon but I thought I would drop in and listen to him on the future of application development. Sadly this meant missing a session on BI but even I can’t be in two places at once. Mike’s theme is that the value of application developers in [...]

Dean Hager from Lawson came on to follow-up on the dynamic business applications story. Dynamic means “continuous change, activity, or progress” and Enterprise Applications “suck at this” to use his words. But this is a problem as the world is changing - people change, events cause change, the business climate changes and more. He asked [...]

Connie Moore and John Rymer kicked off today talking about Dynamic Business Applications and their first discussion was around brown paper bags. They made the point that brown paper bags are a pure commodity and all you can do is reduce costs. Other kinds of bags offer more opportunities for innovation and, thus, more margins. [...]

Mike Gualtieri of Forrester had a blog post a few months back that I missed then but that he pointed out to me this week - What Is Your Future? In it he outlines two scenarios at either end of a continuum. One is that application development changes in incremental ways such that “The application [...]