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When building applications with Blueriq, or in any type of software, there is always some degree of conflict between business and IT stakeholders. Points for discussion are usually the priority of features and the speed of delivery of said features.
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There is a gap developing between the business users of enterprise applications and the IT professionals charged with providing these applications. The business leaders are looking for modern, easy-to-use applications that can be quickly deployed to solve a specific problem or respond to a market opportunity. The IT organization is typically working toward a strategic goal of standardizing on a limited set of comprehensive application suites in order to minimize integration issues, maximize security and reduce IT costs. These competing goals often lead to strategic misalignment. |
It is important that all stakeholders speak the same language to resolve conflicts concerning the development efforts. It has to be clear how Blueriq positions itself and what tasks Blueriq should be performing, and what tasks Blueriq should not be performing. For these purposes, Gartner's Pace-Layered Application Strategy is a useful methodology. It is used for categorizing applications in a manner that reflects how they are used and their rate of change.
Dynamics
Our world is so dynamic that organizations have to be able to adapt continuously. Next to that products and services become more knowledge intensive. These developments have a large impact on business processes and supporting software applications. The traditional approach, in which IT is leading, does not suffice any longer. The problem lies in aligning IT systems with the fast-paced business environment. A bottleneck can be complex translations from business specifications to the technical world.
The external world changes at a tremendous velocity. When a new product launch goes viral on social media, the orders the next day may skyrocket or plummet, depending on nature of the reaction of consumers. The rate of change is short, in the range of days or weeks.
The business tries to follow trends and to monetize on evolving opportunities. Examples here are the release of a new product or type of contract. The rate of change a week to one or several month.
The world of IT changes at a much slower pace. When new technology comes available, it may be adopted after careful consideration and with a plan for the migration of the old technology. The pace here is a month to a year.
A Pace-Layered View of Systems
In the past companies often chose one strategy for selecting, deploying and managing applications. Although the chosen applications were carefully selected, taking into account how the application is used is often neglected. Gartner has defined three application categories to distinguish application types and help organizations develop more appropriate strategies for each.
'I do not know exactly what I want. I need to experiment.'
New applications that are built on an ad-hoc basis to address new business requirements or opportunities. These are typically short life cycle projects (zero to 12 months) using departmental or outside resources and consumer-grade technologies.
'I know what I want, but my needs are unique and there are no packages.'
Applications that enable unique company processes or industry-specific capabilities. They have a medium life cycle (one to three years), but need to be reconfigured frequently to accommodate changing business practices or customer requirements.
'I know what I want and it does not have be unique.'
Established packaged applications or legacy homegrown systems that support core transaction processing and manage the organization's critical master data. The rate of change is low, because the processes are well-established and common to most organizations, and often are subject to regulatory requirements.
The positioning of Blueriq
Blueriq positions itself as The sweet spot of Blueriq is a platform for developing Systems of Differentiation. With our Dynamic Case Management proposition solution we want to streamline business processes and facilitate cooperation between stakeholders. The applications developed there concern the customer as well as mid-office workers, and are used to transform the business, increasing customer satisfaction, employee happiness, throughput by automation and reducing costs. These systems usually have a life-cycle of several years before they are succeeded by new requirements by changes in the outside world.
Blueriq is not a system of innovationless suited for building a System of Innovation. These address applications that are very rapidly developed, but do not have to be maintainable as the life-cycle is under a year. Blueriq applications are intrinsically testable and maintainable (A maintainable and agile architecture). Blueriq also is not a system of recordless suited to build a System of Record. The regulatory requirements applied to a system of records are fulfilled by specialized systems that have as core feature the long-life cycle of data, and all the migrations that are needed for this long life-cycle. The data of cases we handle or data of the forms that are filled in can be stored temporary in Blueriq for a limited amount of time. This can be months if a case is long running. But should afterwards be send to a system of records for safe-keeping.
See also this page for an overview of the different stores: About the Blueriq stores
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We invite you to consult Gartner for more information. This article is based on: http://www.gartner.com/newsroom/id/1923014 |
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