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July 18, 2003

Faster, Better, Cheaper?

Strategic business application development: The only constant is change

by Sanjay Murthi

Recently, I was asked what current and future trends would most affect strategic business applications. I feel that we're at an unusual confluence of at least three trends that are strongly influencing strategic business application development: open source; distributed, multinational development; and the contraction of project cycles. These three trends and the challenges they present are worth some detailed discussion.

The Opportunities

1. Open source software for building applications. The rise of viable open source applications has made it much easier for application development teams to get reliable, low-cost platforms upon which to build, as well as infrastructure "plumbing" products that teams previously had to design and build themselves. Before the wide availability of open source products, application development teams had few choices, especially if the capabilities required were not commercially available. Teams can now work with both source and binary versions of products, customizing only what's needed and reusing work done by others for the rest. Large online communities that have grown around many open source products make it easy to evaluate product suitability as well as find work-arounds and bug fixes.

Teams are also saving time. Before open source took off, it frequently took days, if not weeks to gain access to commercial products. You had to fill out a vendor form, wait for the sales call, get a demo, get a trial license, and so on. With the Internet, you can begin evaluating a variety of open source products within hours. Thanks to open source competition, many commercial vendors have made it much easier to evaluate their software. Licensing is also becoming less rigorous as these companies compete in the open source arena; organizations can now take advantage of free developer or single CPU licenses.

2. Distributed development using multinational teams. Historically, Fortune 500 enterprises have used multiple, global application development teams to build strategic systems. Now, even smaller organizations are doing this. A major driver has been the rise of outsourcing opportunities in lower-cost countries; the significant cost differences make it possible for smaller businesses to develop strategic applications that would have been unimaginable previously. Successful track records in delivering such solutions have given a broad range of organizations a sense of trust and comfort with using multinational teams. Improvements in telecommunications and widespread access to the Internet have also reduced operational and infrastructure costs. Project teams and customers can now share computers remotely and easily gain direct access to each other's files and documents.

3. Shorter project cycles. Many organizations have come to the realization that large, multiyear, big bang projects have high failure rates compared to smaller projects, and frequently produce headaches in the form of major delays and cost overruns. Also, organizations have discovered that the business reasons that originally justified the big bang endeavors can change dramatically before the project is halfway done.

Smaller projects are cheaper to fund and offer more flexibility in terms of business goals and resources. There's a good chance that the business reasons that justified a three- or six-month project are still valid when it's delivered. And if things change, the impact is much smaller. Especially in the current economy, smaller projects with shorter cycles are attractive for companies of all sizes.

Another factor propelling this trend is the increasing number of Internet/intranet-based application development projects. These projects frequently don't have the luxury of several months' time to deployment. In many industries, companies have observed the successful rollout of Web-based projects, often with tremendous strategic value, and therefore understand the value of starting small.

Finally, the rising popularity of rapid, "agile" development methods (including eXtreme Programming and SCRUM) fit well with small, integrated teams working on short projects. These methods support flexibility in both requirements and project planning; teams aim to deliver projects through a succession of short iterations that may last just a few weeks. The goal is to make successive iterations come closer to the mark of increasing value to the organization.

The Challenges

While each of these trends has attractive benefits, they also bring new complexities and challenges for both IT management and application development teams. Let's take them one by one.

1. Open source. How does an organization handle support, licensing issues, and so on? In the traditional mode, organizations bought software from a proprietary vendor, who took care of support, training, and negotiated all licenses. With open source, these issues become additional factors to consider as you carry on with traditional competitive product reviews and vendor viability assessment. Support issues in particular bring new wrinkles. Should support be done internally or by an external provider? If done externally, you need to know the provider's track record: Is the provider viable? How much will support really cost? If you decide to take care of support internally, who will handle support and enhancement requests? And will your organization be required to release modified source code back to the open source community?