Back to Basics

Having spent the best part of 20 years developing business software, it occurs to me that the business software industry, and the business users/consumers of the software, have (perhaps unwittingly) led us down the garden path.

The idea of a computerised system that captures and models the very essence of a business, automating the decision-making process, and cutting out paperwork is an attractive one, but it has become clear that this is something of a holy grail that remains agonisingly within sight, but out of reach.

In pursuit of this ideal, we create more and more complex computer systems, using increasingly sophisticated design methodologies. We have drawn parallels with the construction industry, and have held up hopes that principles used to build bridges (for example) could be applied to the creation of software solutions.

Now let me say right now, if you are designing a weapons control system, an application that controls and monitors a nuclear reactor, or any other high risk, specialised modelling or control system then yes, absolutely, I want you to test every aspect to the highest degree possible, I want you to capture every rule possible, and I want you to build multiple levels of safety measures into the system.

But… business sofware is a completely different beast. Whether in a private sector or a public sector organisation, day to day business involves people, interactions with people, and regular changes to business rules. In many cases, business rules themselves are flexible and need to be applied in different ways according to circumstances. Capturing and encoding this into fragments of computer logic is not only resource-intensive, but such rules are likely to become stale before final testing has been completed.

It is this fixation with business modelling that has led to a number of different systems development strategies, all of which have brought great techniques and tools to the table, but none of them have provided the silver bullet, or the holy grail. The simple fact is that they can’t – organisations, whether large or small, are infinitely complex beasts and trying to pin down the intricacies of daily operations is like trying to carry water in your hands. If you freeze it, you can carry it easily in the form of ice cubes, but you lose all the dynamic and fluid properties of the original substance!

The problems associated with “freezing” a business into a software model has produced a multi-billion dollar industry, where projects fail, business analysts come into an organisation on a regular basis to re-analyse requirements, and software teams are constantly adding code to cope with caveats, anomalies and changes to business rules. After a while, a system becomes so bogged down with these additions and changes that a system rewrite is recommended, and the whole lucrative circus starts again.

There IS a solution, but I suspect I am somewhat ahead of my time when I suggest this, and so we will have to wait quite a while before it happens (sadly). We need to strip our business systems down to the core requirements of record keeping, report creation and data analysis. Allied to this, we need to return to the situation where skilled, experienced business experts are employed to work with these systems, use them as decision support tools, but ultimately business rule enforcement comes from the application of brain power, and not a reliance on a software system that’s probably using a stale rule-base and is a very efficient way of compounding errors very quickly.

Systemising a business, allowing low-skilled, low-paid staff to operate that business works fine for a fast food franchise, but in most other cases businesses should regard the “meat ware” within their organisation as more vitally important than any software or hardware. It is a fact that people are the greatest resource any business has and, until such time that a bio-computer can make real decisions, we really need to stop looking to computers to do the thinking for us.

In a nutshell, business software is a powerful, flexible way of managing important records that are relevant to your business. By stripping things back to basics, business software can become simpler, more reliable, easier and cheaper to develop/maintain, and businesses can avoid risks associated with vendor lock-in, and the need for massive system rewrites every few years.

Remember this: Software is a business tool that can aid and support decision-making, and inform businesses at operational and strategic levels. It is NOT supposed to run your business for you, nor can it ever accurately capture the up-to-the-minute nuances of your business.

I look forward to a time when we see a return to simpler software, and leave fuzzy rule-enforcement and decision-making to the devices that are capable of that; our brains.