At the beginning of this decade, IT departments, consultants and freelance programmers latched on to a set of tools called rapid application development environments that consisted of a “programming light” method of delivering in-house solutions for business process management. By purchasing a rapid application development software package, organizations' IT departments could, in theory, gather requirements, develop a solution and deliver an application. If you have experienced the in-house solution, you know the success rates for such solutions were dubious. In reality, these new in-house solutions offered little benefit over the out-of-the-box alternative and required endless hours of requirements gathering and prototype iterations with the business team. Moreover, the end product solved a business need for a point-in-time and could not change to meet evolving business needs without a change management process that required additional requirements gathering, prototype iterations and IT department time.
Realizing the shortcomings of IT development and the rapid application development environment, emerging software companies chose a business need and focused on providing a configurable platform for the business need. Examples include:
- Salesforce.com for customer relationship management software (CRM)
- Vocus for public and government relations management software
For the security and GRC professional responsible for evaluating software for incident reporting, case management, case collaboration and other security operations. The numerous benefits of a configurable platform include:
- Accountability of a business partner rather than IT resources prone to reassignment
- Programmatic abstraction of configurations from the business layer, allowing seamless upgrade to functionality without impacting configurations
- Empowered business users capable of making configurations that align the application to current business processes
- Lengthened product lifecycle
- Support provided by configurable platform experts, not internal IT resources
In summary, rapid application development software will continue to support highly specialized business needs that lack the demand required to support companies addressing the specific business need. However, D3 and similar developers of configurable platforms will continue to dominate the marketplace whether for CRM, PRM/GRM or security and GRC software.