Business Rules Technology Belongs In Your Architecture

Checkmate! You're Toast.

Those are words you don't want to hear when playing chess. Similarly, you don't want to be checkmated in the rough and tumble of the business real world.

To win at chess and in business to you have to make smart decisions constantly and consistently - decisions that are guided by a carefully crafted strategy designed to checkmate your opponent or, at a minimum, to stay in the game. Deciding what moves to make in chess is hard enough even though it is just you and your opponent. The decisions businesses have to make everyday can be much more complicated and the stakes are much higher.

Where Is Your Decision Logic Implemented?

Most firms embedd them deep within its application code far from the businesspeople who understand the business rules best. That might be OK for business rules that do not change frequently. But, for business rules that change frequently or need that need to change quickly, there is a better way. Forrester has identified business rules technology as one of the Top 15 Technology Trends Enterprise Architects Should Watch and one of the 5 key changes app dev shops should make in 2010 (attend or replay the free Webinar Live: Tuesday, October 20, 2009, at 11:00 a.m. Eastern time).

Avoid Checkmate. Include Business Rules Technology In Your Architecture

Business rules platforms (often called decision management) allow decision logic to be authored and executed external to you application. The result is better management and faster change of your business rules because:

• The business rules are not embedded deep in application code such as Cobol, .NET, or Java code that only a programmer can change.
• Business rules are executed consistently across all applications that need them because they are implemented once and shared for all applications that need the.
• Businesspeople who understand the business rules can author and maintain the rules directly instead of explaining the rules to programmers who then have to code them in a programming language.

The result for your business: faster change and consistent decisions.

Research For Application Development And Enterprise Architecture Professionals

John Rymer and I consistently published research on business rules platforms, best practices, case studies, and technical architecture. If you are interested in learning more about business rules technology please feel free to schedule an inquiry with John and me and check out the research documents below.

The Forrester Wave™: Business Rules Platforms, Q2 2008

The Truth About Business Rules Algorithms

Best Practices In Implementing Business Rules

Case Study: California Association Of Realtors Innovates With Business Rules

Case Study: Hypo Real Estate Enables Credit Risk Professionals With Business Rules

Must You Choose Between Business Rules And Complex Event Processing Platforms?

Case Study: The Doctors Company Innovates While Rebuilding Its Core Systems

Deputize End-User Developers To Deliver Business Agility And Reduce Costs

Mike Gualtieri, Senior Analyst

email: mgualtieri@forrester.com

twitter: mgualtieri
 

Leaving User Experience To Chance Hurts Companies

Have you ever driven in Boston?  If you have, then you know that the streets are very difficult to navigate. Why? In colonial Boston someone built a house. And then someone else built a house. Then they built a path between the two houses. And so on and so forth. As a result, Boston’s layout was accidental and the result is a convoluted set of streets that frustrates both residents and visitors.

Similarly, application development shops achieve poor results when they design without a plan, leaving user experience to chance. They:

• Hurt conversion rates. A well-designed site can have up to a 200% higher visit-to-order conversion rate than a poorly designed site. And visit-to-lead conversion rates can be more than 400% higher on sites with a superior user experience.
• Alienate customers. Retained customers become an annuity to your business and are ambassadors of your value and brand. Well-designed sites have page abandonment rates up to 41% lower than their inferior cousins.
• Run up development costs. Upfront user experience design can greatly reduce the need for extensive redesign and redevelopment that may be necessary to fix a poor user experience.

Wow! App dev shops who are not doing user experience design have a great opportunity to substantially increase their value to the business. Our latest research on user experience (UX) design shows application development professionals how.

Mike Gualtieri

Senior Analyst, Forrester Research

The Dream Stack For Developing And Deploying Web Applications

I want to develop a Web application - a really good Web app. The kind of Web app that will make me so rich that I can buy an $9.4 million co-op over looking Central Park, a Yacht registered in Monaco, and hire an architect to build my dream-house west of Boston that is a combo of Buckminster Fuller, FLW, and MTV cribs. Throw in a vintage sweet ride like Don Draper's Cadillac and lifetime membership to the Boston Sports Club. I'm set.

The problem: What technology am I going to use to develop and and deploy a pwn-some Web app that will scale forever and never go down. (I need a great idea too!)

The solution: Enlist your illustrious help to come up with the perfect Dream Stack to help make all my dreams come true.

Dream Stack: What Are The Requirements?

The Dream Stack is a perfect combination of tools, technologies, and platforms that meet both development and deployment requirements. But, deciding what combinations of technologies to use is no simple task because there are choices and combinations galore. Here are my requirements for the Dream Stack:

Development

• Low-cost tools (because this is a startup).
• Maximize developer productivity.
• Faster development and faster change.
• Can develop great user experiences.
• Availability of talented developers (we plan to grow fast).
• Will support a scale-out deployment architecture of both data and computing.

Deployment

• Low-cost, linear-cost deployment  (because this is a startup).
• Support scale-out architecture of both data and computing.
• Architected to never go down.
• Employs security features
• Easy to manage and monitor

Your Thoughts? What Is The Dream Stack?

Your Dream Stack should consist of tools, technologies, and platforms that are currently available either as open source, commercialy available products or a combination of both. Your stack will probably, but not necessarily, include programming languages, databases, app servers and/or cloud, IDEs, libraries, and other platform technologies. Any combination is fine as long as it meets the requirements of the Dream Stack.

1. What other requirements should the Dream Stack have?

2. What is your recommended Dream Stack?

Mike Gualtieri, Senior Analyst, Forrester Research

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Cross-posted at Dr. Dobbs Code Talk

Excuses, excuses: The Business Doesn't Know What It Wants

I have grown weary of hearing excuses (for 20 years)  from application development professionals about why they are challenged when it comes to developing and delivering applications that meet the expectations of the business. Excuses such as:

• The business doesn't know what it wants.
• The requirements keep changing.

 

Application development professionals are not served by these lame excuses because no one gets what they want or need. The business is left lacking and application development professionals deserve their reputation. If you have no excuses, then I salute you. If you want to stop the excuses, here's how:

Solution 1: Get Over It

Stop denying reality. The business either doesn't know or can't always articulate what application features they need to make their business more productive, more responsive to customers, and more flexible to market changes. And, they often change their minds because they are just thinking this through themselves and that often results in new needs or missed requirements. This is the nature of the beast. Accept it and stopping beating your head against the wall. It's not good for you.

Solution 2: Understand The Business And Your Users

What's a poor app dev gonna do? You must learn the workings of the business, understand what customers want, what competitors are doing, and what it will take to create a great user experience for users. This will give you a much better context when you speak with the business and you can work together in the requirements, offer new ideas, and head-off many of the gothcha's that come up later. This is your job and you have to start doing it to the n^th degree. Keep being strictly a tech-head if you want, but stop the excuses, please. Learn the business.

Solution 3: Build For Change

Things change constantly. You need to choose technologies, architectures, and processes that enable you to respond to change. This requires getting creative and being open to new combinations. For example, maybe an event processing architecture is a more natural way to respond to what is happening in the business than a service oriented architecture. Or, maybe you can build a more better user experience by using Adobe Flex rather than JSF. Building for change is a lot easier when you know the business because it helps you to anticipate future requirements.

Solution 4: Get Passionate About Your Craft!

The industrialization of software development has been an epic fail. Developing software is not like building a car on an assembly line or bottling beer like Laverne and Shirley at the Shotz brewery. Software development is a creative craft more akin to making a movie where talent, creativity, discipline, and passion result in great creations. For years, app dev pros have been told to keep their heads down - that all you need to do is follow the project plan and write your code. Wrong. Lift your head up, find your passion, understand the business and then use your technical creativity to make beautiful applications that users find useful, usable, and desirable.

What's your excuse?

 Mike Gualtieri, Senior Analyst, Forrester Research

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Distributed Cache Technologies Are Ready For The Mainstream

The open source project, Memcached, is a common staple for many of the largest Web sites including facebook, twitter, wikipedia, and others. The enterprise software vendors haven entered the market and have added features that are more attractive to enterprise IT - especially to Java shops.

In recent months, we have had a significant uptick in client inquiries about distributed cache technologies and how they can be used to improve performance, scale, and reduce costs of Web and application architectures. We are also encountering distributed cache technology in conjunction with other platform technologies such as CEP. There is also an intriguing potential for distributed cache technology to become a staple of cloud computing environments (some might say amazon S3 has the properties of a distributed cache).

Based upon this increasing level of interest, the maturity of the products, and the potential of distributed caches to radically change they way applications are architected John Rymer and I have initiated a Forrester Wave evaluation of Distributed Cache technologies.Our current list of candidates to evaluate include:

• Alichisoft NCache
• Gemstone
• Gigaspaces
• IBM ExtremeScale
• Memcached (we may also include Gear6 and Schooner since they support memcached)
• Oracle Coherence
• Red Hat
• Terracotta

Are There Any Other Products We Should Include?

These are the products that we have encountered when speaking with both vendors and customers. Are there any others that you think should be on this list? For example, should Amazon S3 make our list or are there any other commercial products that are available?

We Would Love To Hear From Customers Who Are Using Any Of These Products.

If you are a client using any distributed cache technology we would like to speak with you about your experiences with these products and the business and technical requirements that drove you to implement the technology.

Please let us know.

Mike Gualtieri, Senior Analyst

John R. Rymer, Vice President and Principal Analyst

Application Development Professionals Must Take The User Experience Bull By The Horns

- Developers can write efficient and elegant code.

- Architects can choose cost effective and flexible platforms.

- Quality assurance and testing pros can make sure it works bug free. 
- Business analysts can uncover and document key requirements.
- Project managers can craft a plan to get the app written on-time.
- Managers can make sure that it is all done within the budget.

- CIO's can find talent and put together teams.

This Prowess Is All For Naught If You Don't Get The User Experience Right!

But, this technical, process, and management prowess is all for naught if you cannot design a compelling user experience (UX) that is useful, usable, and desirable.

Application Development Pros Are No Less Capable Of Learning UX Design Than Anyone Else.

Unfortunately, many application development professionals are unlearned when it comes to knowing how to design user experiences that makes users say "Wow!".  It is not that they don't want to design great user experiences. They do. It is just that no one ever taught them how.

The Time Is Now To Take The User Experience Bull By The Horns.

User's increasingly expect and demand an experience that's valuable, easy to use, aesthetically pleasing, and emotionally satisfying. To be successful, app dev shops must build apps that win the hearts and minds of their customers.

Benefits Will Accrue To Those Who Do

• Improved user experiences will boost revenue and loyalty by more than 14% for customer-facing Web sites and improve productivity and employee satisfaction for internal applications.
• Application development shops increase their value to the business.
• Application development professionals increase their value to IT organizations.

Application development shops wishing to get started can read:

 Forrester's Best Practices In User Experience Design 

Questions for you:

1. Do you agree that app dev shops should be able to design great user experiences or should they leave that to specialists?

2. How important is user experience design in your organizations?

 

Mike Gualtieri

Senior Analyst, Forrester Research

Follow me on Twitter

 

 

5 Ways Not To Waste Time On Twitter

Twitter is the social media darling of 2009. The micro-blogging machine was the fourth most visited site after Facebook, MySpace, and YouTube for the week ending June 27, 2009, according to Hitwise. Chances are that you are using it. I am and so are another 44.5 million people (according to ComScore June 2009).

In the several months I have been using Twitter, I have gone from being a skeptic to becoming a tentative fan. It is useful because I can follow colleagues and clients. It is fun because I can follow political uprisings, writers such as Peggy Noonan, athletes such as Lance Armstrong, television series such as Mad Men, and of course, William Shatner.

There are many questions that have to be answered about Twitter. Is this a valuable use of my time? Is this an efficient way of communicating? The navel-gazing, cheerleading social media experts (you know who you are) think they have the answers, but these are salad days for social media Web sites and especially for Twitter.

I do think Twitter is here to stay. It will add new features, gain even more momentum, and perhaps be gobbled up by an Internet giant such as Facebook, Google, Microsoft, or Yahoo. So, use Twitter, but use it wisely. To avoid wasting time on Twitter:

1. Use a Twitter client such as Tweetdeck. If you are still using http://www.twitter.com for all of your Twitter activity, then you must download a free Twitter client such as TweetDeck right away. Why? Because TweetDeck lets you create groups to follow a subset of friends or colleagues, search for relevent tweets, and manage multiple Twitter accounts. TweetDeck even offers an iPhone version. A Twitter client with these features will save you gobs of time since you can view simulatenous filtered streams of Tweets from a group of colleagues, people who Tweet about you, and a subject (hashtag) that interests you.
2. Be discerning about who you follow and don't be afraid to unfollow. Twitter is the great Speakers' Corner of the Internet. As such, anyone can spout any amount of blather in any frequency that their brain synapses will allow. Don't follow nutcases, loons, or weirdos (unless you are one too). Worse than crazies though are the scrourge of all Internet humanity - the spammers. Yes, the spammers have found Twitter and they are out to sell us free credit, foreign companions, cheap prescriptions, and products that overcome our genetic deficiencies.
3. Don't trawl for followers. I know, I know. You think if you follow them, then maybe they will follow you and then you can say "I have umpteen followers!" You can spend huge amounts of time trying to find people to follow - hoping that maybe they will follow you. Some trawling is ok, but don't get caught in an epic battle like Ashton Kutcher and CNN who competed with each other to see who could be the first to get one million followers (Ashton won and now has 3,397,799 followers).
4. Make your Tweets count. Why do you Tweet? Are you just experimenting, trying to promote your personal or organization's brand, find out what is going on in your field of interest, or just connecting with friends? Twitter famously asks "What are you doing?", but it doesn't mean literally like many newbies think. "Taking out the trash" or "Sugar high after eating swedish fish" can eat up your time and be uninteresting to followers. Try to make your tweets about something that is relevent, interesting, or perhaps humorous to your followers. Having said that, it is perfectly reasonable to reveal some of your personality in your tweets and to add an occasional serendiptous tweet such as "Why do birds sing?". Check out Twitter's best practices for businesses.
5. Assign someone to Tweet for you. This is not as ludicrous as you might think. If you are using Twitter as a corporate tool for public relations, promotion, or marketing then it may be quite rational to pay someone (there may already be a rogue tweeter in your organization) to Tweet about your company news or to further your marketing goals. Feature films District 9 and Inglourius Basterds used Twitter to boost buzz that some say resulted in stronger openings. But, remember, you also need to find out about who is tweeting about your company and listening takes time too. It may be much more cost effective to make it someone else's job to tweet and monitor twitter than to soak up your valuable time.

Please share with us how you use Twitter and any tips you have for using it.

Follow me on Twitter.

Mike Gualtieri

Senior Analyst, Forrester Research

Why Are Many Developers Living In District 9?

A common diagnosis of many troubled app dev shops is that they don't understand the business well enough. The result is developers build applications that don't quite satisify the business needs, are hard to change, have poor user experiences, are not delivered on time, or any combination of the above. Despite all the silver bullets over the years such as formal methodologies, new roles, tools, and technologies, app dev shops remain largely afflicted. According to a survey I conducted last year, application developers concur that a common characteristic of great application developers is that they have a deep understanding of the business domain. Understanding the business does not mean you read the docs. It means you know the business in your bones.

Great application developers have talent that is inspired by a deep understanding of the user, a deep understand of the business goals, and a deep understanding of all that is possible with technology. Developers are not going to get this deep understanding of the user and the business by sitting in a cube on the 9th floor overlooking the parking lot. They need to get in the game physically and mentally. Getting in the game is difficult if application developers are forced to live in District 9 by the business or by a self-imposed aversion to break out of it.

What do you think? Are most developers living in District 9 by force or by choice?

 

Complex Event Processing Is Cool - And Very Hot!

The founding Fathers of the United States understood all too well the importance of complex events when on July 4th, 1776 they wrote:

"When in the course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to...etcetera, etcetera, and etcetera".

Similarly, many of today's business and IT leaders understand the importance of reacting to business events as they occur in real-time and how that can dramatically change the performance and agility of their business.

Event processing, often called “complex event processing” (CEP) is a hot new enterprise middleware category. CEP answers the question: “What is happening right now in our business”? Sometimes the answer is as simple as ordering more products when the inventory dips below safety stock, but often it involves recognizing patterns of business events that foretell critical business situations that require immediate action.

CEP platforms analyze streams of data as they flow from live sources such as transaction flows, click streams, market data feeds, and myriad other sources of data swirling around inside a business environment. The platforms then prompt either downstream applications or people to react to the information by resetting processing priorities, changing online sales strategies, buying and selling stocks, or performing some other action.

The Forrester Wave™: Complex Event Processing (CEP) Platforms, Q3 2009

Mike Gualtieri and John Rymer evaluated nine complex event processing (CEP) platforms using 114 criteria. Please see the complete results of the evaluation in August 4, 2009 The Forrester Wave: Complex Event Processing Platforms report. The products included in the Wave evaluation include:

 

 

Notes From The Field - Literally.

My wife and I attended an outdoor wedding yesterday at the Blue Horse Farm in the beautiful Catskills mountains of upstate New York. The beautiful ceremony and reception was set amidst the backdrop of sunny fields, ready-to-pick arugula, a big old barn, grazing horses, and a baby calf named "Johnny".

You never know who you will meet at a wedding and you never know what you may learn from them. Among the distinguished guests attending the wedding I had the pleasure of meeting were Martin Johnson, a freelance Jazz music reviewer for the Wall Street Journal, and  France (yes, like the country), a graphic designer for Lord & Taylor.  France has to design appealing promotional graphics that result in sell through and Martin has to craft his music reviews to make his readers hear without hearing. To be successful, both Martin and France have to be extraordinarily in-tune with their audience.

Application Developers Also Need To Be Extraordinarily In-Tune With End-Users

My upcoming research on Best Practices In User Experience Design (expected publication August 2009) reveals, among other things, that application developers rely far too heavily on asking end-users or stakeholders what their "requirements" are when designing applications. The best application developers also have a six sense that I call design imagination that helps them fill in the holes left by inarticulate end-users, unknowing business stakeholders, and the evolving business context. Both Martin and France support the design imagination sentiment:

• France taps into the culture of her customers. France has her own sense of fashion, but she has to set that aside when designing promotional graphics. Instead she needs to get inside the head of her target customer and design something that will make them buy more couture. That means looking at sales data but, it also means tapping into the culture of her customers. Similarly, application development professionals, need to understand that they are not designing applications for themselves. Listening to end-user requirements though is only part of the equation because they often do not know exactly what they need or are often not able to articulate it. Exceptional application developers must have a "design imagination" to fill in the blanks.
• Martin writes for his brother and sister. To insure that his writing is compelling to the right audience, Martin writes his reviews to his brother and sister. He says they are representative of his target audience. Likewise, applications development professionals should walk in the shoes of end-users to deeply understand them and design for them.

Design Imagination Is Under Attack

Application development shops that adopt Agile methods should be very careful that rapid fire iteration doesn't kill design imagination. If developers relegate themselves to coders who are corrected every two weeks by stakeholders the resulting application may miss the mark of creating a great user experience. The problem: 1) stakeholders are not often not the end-users, 2) developers become more code focused.

Worse, Waterfall methods usually rely only on upfront requirements gathering from dispassionate business analysts that are often far removed from the trenches. The result: Nothing is left to the imagination.

A balanced approach is needed if application development professionals are to create great user experiences. Please read my upcoming research on Best Practices In User Experience Design next month for more in this.

 

Mike Gualtieri

Senior Analyst