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Memo to CIOs: Design for people, build for change

By Mitch Betts, Computerworld

Aug 22, 2007 — That's the new, CxO-level mantra at Forrester Research Inc. What's it mean? Forrester gurus say that "design for people, build for change" means this:

Designing for people builds on the convergence of technologies like collaboration and content management for the masses and the Web 2.0 technologies that next-generation workers expect.

Building for change, which is concerned with technology's role in making enterprises more flexible, adaptable, and agile, ranges from leveraging business rules and business process management (BPM) software to make processes more dynamic, to speeding collaborative software development with new practices and job roles, to the next generation of IT virtualization.

Oh, and "designing for people" doesn't just mean a snazzy, friendly user interface anymore (though that's important, of course). Forrester's Connie Moore says the problem with today's systems is that...

People are left to figure out how collaboration, content creation, voice communications, and other less predictable interactions fit into the business process. It's a huge productivity killer in today's work environment and leads to chronic information overload for stressed-out workers. We need to deliver information and tools in the context of what people are doing, otherwise they make business decisions with incomplete information.

The other problem is the inflexibility of today's systems because business rules are hard-coded, buried, in home-grown programs. Forrester's Mike Gilpin says:

Historically, we havenıt built for change because past generations of IT systems were developed using mostly programming code. Business rules and processes were buried in code, whether old mainframe systems, client/server systems, or Web sites. But code is hard to change, and the change usually requires a minimum cycle time measured in months. Thatıs not fast enough anymore.

I agree with at least three points here:

1. After all these years, our systems still aren't people-centric, people-literate.
2. We've got to use exploit our systems to alleviate "chronic information overload for stressed-out workers." We should "deliver information and tools in the context of what people are doing."
3. We need to separate out our business rules so they can be changed when the need arises -- which is very often, these days.

Gilpin says there are five technologies that are key to "design for change."

• Business rules engines or platforms. A business rule is a declarative statement of policy rather than defined procedural code. The engine then enforces that rule at runtime. Rules engines have been too complex and proprietary, but the latest generation rules platforms are changing that.
• BPM software. Increasingly, BPM suites are being used to implement processes in a model-driven way that programmers would have previously built in code.
• Service-oriented architecture (SOA).
• Business event management.
• Information as a Service. An information service provides a view of real-time, high-quality information about a specific business entity like a customer or product. It might be provided by middleware or packaged as an individual software component, but the information comes from a diverse set of sources including operational systems, operational data stores, data warehouses, content repositories, collaboration stores, and even streaming sources in advanced cases.

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