Gartner BPM Session: Governing End-User Development

A research track dating back to the 90's looking at end-user development.  A 'situation' born from end-user frustration with IT backlog and lack of agility.  Much of this was IT or near-IT roles hired within the business unit.  Basically technology savvy people.

This trend is not slowing and with new tools that are model driven, drag-and-drop, etc., is in fact increasing.  This is about enabling safely and creating a bridge between business and IT.

Drivers

• Frustration with agility, Cost, Time for results from IT
• Increasing sophisticated business users
• Availability of tools to automated but without classic programming

Key issue with end-user development.  End-user don't understand or focus on key ideas like

• Security
• Data Access protection
• Service Levels
• Architecture

Matt broke this type of development into two streams.  One being opportunistic (short term, limited scope) and Systemic (strategic long living, high impact). 

Key changes from Functionally Driven to Process Driven (this is the bridge to end user development)

• Most observation were very soft (roles are functional, moving to roles are process centric or Hand-offs are implicit to hand-offs are explicit),
• Only one was hard.  Business rule changes rely on the IT department to schedule changes to application code - moving to - Business rule and process steps are changes by business process owners.

Key observations - when should end-user development be enabled by IT

• Service level characteristics - EG if the system goes down you lose revenue
• What does it do - what does it access - Security, privacy, data protection, etc.  If the application presses on these topics - MUST be done by IT.  COMMENT: Matt's discussion is almost End User Developed VERSUS IT Developed.  I think this fails to talk about how IT should enable End User Developed applications which create protections from these issues.

Matt then talked about end-user developed applications and really framed these an small internal department focused projects.  He then moved to how BPM shifts from these silos to jointly owned Business-IT projects.  He started by talking about BPM based 'opportunistic' projects and then moved into a discussion on 'systematic' projects.  Here he offered a few ideas on key issues (again) like service levels, compliance to architecture, etc.   In fact my observation was an IT centric viewpoint on the issues that need to be addressed to get IT involved. 

I'm awaiting the next slide, but Matt hasn't discussed what tremendous benefits come from coordinated business/IT project in which each as a role to play and how that justifies supporting these critical initiatives.

That last slide never came....

Authors Note: See Sandy - Real time post!

Comments

[Sandy Kemsley]

See? That wasn't so scary. Now you have to learn to give me a little "link love" by linking back to my blog in your posts. :)