BIZense Blog

When we think of business, we never need to care even a bit about IT but it is not vice versa. When IT is working, for each and every thing they need to align themselves with business or otherwise their things are not useful. If we think IT as a business enabler why do we have to involve IT into business, rather if IT can work independent of the business, it would probably provide more freedom to both the groups.

The Parallel - Perpendicular Paradigm

The problem lies in the way software applications are developed today. As of now business and IT are parallel and whenever business people want any help from software for their business, they need to communicate their business problems to IT and this is the core reason for conflicts arising between the groups. Because for any software implementation, business has to cross through IT to get it implemented. Now there are things coming up to align IT with business by giving the logic control of applications to business poeple. But we can make the business and IT perpendicular to each other such that they don’t have to cross each other for any thing. Whatever business wants, it can implement those by themselves without going through any of IT.

How it can be done will be a big question?

The answer is simple, let business people do the programming rather than making others program their business. Now imagining business people doing programming is difficult but if we consider the work business people do when specifying requirements is more like programming, the only difference being that it is done in a business level language. That means business people will create their applications by doing business programming in a language in which they are comfortable.

Enough work for business people !

Then what will IT do when business will do programming by themselves. They will provide the infrastructure through which these business programs would become actual running applications. They will not be concerned about business applications but they will only worry about getting those damn business applications working on current computer systems.

 The Future - HLL to BLL

This is not just a thought! Software industry is moving towards it in the form of modeling. Many modeling languages have become prevalent to help business people get closer to programming the applications themselves without getting into so called techincal stuff. Only thing which needs to be changed from modeling approaches is that we need to have a proper transition from HLL (High Level Language like Java, C++) to what we call BLL (Business Level Language) in which business guys can code!

Approach

This approach would be language based rather than model based to facilitate automatic compilation and deployment of business programs. Modeling came up to improve communication between business and IT about various business models (including data model) which anyways should not be communicated rather should be implemented. As is with the evolution of HLL, people already have started to move towards modeling which more than coding in HLL. Next level would be BLL which will actually change the way softwares are developed, making large and complex software applications agile. This approach has many benefits like instead of aligning IT with business, it makes them independent such that they don’t come in the way of each other. Many instances of software projects failing would reduce as there will be lesser dependence on each other. Each one doing the work in which they are experts.

More on this to come in next blog post !