June 2010 Archives

I just read Justin James' most recent diary entries #4 & #5, where he continues to develop his Rat Catcher web application; his next challenge - to integrate custom code, he'd already developed, into the Agile Platform. As Justin said, "I was not worried -- after all, I knew that Integration Studio would let me hook up my application to this code."

I thought I'd share some key learnings and highlights from these two journal entries.
(BTW, If you missed the previous entries of Justin's diary check this previous post on the About Agility blog.)

A few weeks back, we introduced you to a Social Consulting Experiment that we were conducting with Forrester Research's John Rymer. We launched a new web page and invited anyone who wanted to submit a question for Rymer on the topic of "The Future of Enterprise Applications." We called it an "experiment" because, when we launched it we weren't sure how it would turn out - we didn't know how many people would submit questions, or what the response would be on sites like Twitter.

Fast forward a couple weeks, and we're happy to report that our Social Consulting Experiment was a mega-success! More than 60 people submitted questions, proving that there is a lot we need to sort out with regard to the future of enterprise applications, and dozens upon dozens of folks chimed in via Twitter using the #AskRymer hashtag.

John Rymer has sorted through all of the questions we received, and he selected the nine he thought best spoke to the future of enterprise applications. We caught up with him during the Forrester IT Forum and got his responses on video. Here is a recap of the questions Rymer answered:

• What will be the impact of fully web-enabled mobile devices and touch-devices on Enterprise application development?
• How prevalent do you see the use of BPM and ETL tools as opposed to corporations utilizing in-house developed processes to integrate applications or services for SOA? Where do you see the market trend headed in today's economy?
• How do we deal with our existing application portfolio?
• What percentage of future apps will be developed using agile technologies? Applicability of Agile to large scale enterprise apps?
• Will Enterprise Applications be hosted in the Cloud or on premise - what's the selection criteria? What's next after the Cloud?
• Will the next generation of Enterprise apps (both built and bought) be disposable?
• Do you think Enterprise Applications will work like internal social networks for companies?
• What are the key upcoming innovations that will change the face of enterprise applications?
• Will agile organizations with agile tool kits be able to surpass COTS vendors in delivering on-target business applications?

To see his answers to these questions, check out this page. We're excited to have had an opportunity to facilitate this conversation on the future of enterprise applications, and hope you've found it useful as well.

Let's continue the conversation about the future of enterprise applications here on this blog. What do you think? Do you have any lingering questions that we weren't able to answer during this experiment?

It's a known fact: R&D engineers are part of a special breed of IT professional who usually live behind closed doors, in a high-security area of the software vendor's ivory tower.

This means information about what's needed in their products comes from marketing folks and nagging sales reps (yikes!) and the feedback is usually shielded behind an online form that "takes only 2 minutes to fill."

This is all wrong!

Opening up the communication channel between R&D and the rest of the world is the best way to find out what users really need, understand how they are using the products you build and what they think is missing.
 
The problem with an open communication channel is that it also needs to be manageable. Setting up an email account where users can send in their suggestions is a recipe for email flooding; it will require massive manual work to get all feedback and ideas into a workable wish list; it's difficult to provide feedback, and will probably become unmanageable very quickly. So, how do you solve this problem?

Give a warm welcome to crowdsourcing!

The concept is simple; let a community of professionals interact, share their thoughts, vote and comment on other people's ideas. As participation grows, bad ideas will be filtered out, good ideas will bubbled to the top and a lot of great feedback on what's working (or not working) will become crystal clear. The ways this idea actually work have been published in James Surowiecki's best-selling book Wisdom of the Crowds.

This concept led us, at OutSystems, to create a Wisdom of the Crowds application; one that we could use to trigger, nurture and manage this creative process. We built the first version in just 5 days using the Agile Platform, and started using it internally to gather feedback and ideas from our own employees.

We added some functionality, tuned the usability a bit, solved some minor bugs... and then made it available to our user community. Every community member can now add their own ideas, comment on other user ideas or simply vote on the ideas that they find more valuable.

Here's what we achieved in the first two weeks:

388 users have contributed 189 ideas with 537 comments and 1719 "likes" (votes) by the community. Ten ideas have already been implemented and have been made available in the latest version of the Agile Platform. Thirteen ideas are set for implementation in the next release.

During the time it took to write this post the idea count rose to 216, with three additional ideas implemented and sixteen more coming soon!

If you're a member of the OutSystems community, you can access the Wisdom of Crowds here and participate in the online brainstorm.


PS: This app is free, and can be deployed on any Agile Platform installation (including the free Community Edition). If you'd like to use the Wisdom of Crowds app in your company contact us and we'll give you the pointers on how to set it up.

Image credit:Hideyoshi algn