So true. There are a 1000 ways to fail and few paths to success.

Keep spreading the word. Out profession needs to do much better.

Think about it what are we doing in the 21st century coding and recoding over and over business logic that never changes – people doing something to achieve the individual and collective outputs. That’s what we recognised as a core issue and our unique design philosophy addresses. In effect we have separated business logic from the delivery technologies. Someone had to do it …..?

This has been a long journey lead by business thinking. We were 10 year ahead of our time and face huge vested interests. You may have heard of the “innovators dilemma” which applies to the dominant suppliers “If they adopt or make new products that are simple to implement and easy to use, they will lose their massive streams of services revenue. Their sales models are based on selling big deals. A switch to simplicity will crater their businesses”.

Why have you not heard of us? Well for starter we are in UK a virtual desert of enabling software technologies where very difficult to get real understanding of the issues. The likes of Gartner know about us but ignore us. Let’s face it we could crater their business as they rely on continuing complexity to drive their revenues feeding off both plates but not ours! We are also challenging the largest vendors in the US, a real David and Goliath(s) battle. Everyone that comes and sees gets it and is truly impressed. Even we have had difficulty in articulating what we have so coming in fresh will understandably be a challenge.

Bill Gates knew about Procession when that statement was made and by good fortune we did market and sell a little in the US in 2000 which will effectively block any meaningful patents from any one including Procession – see letters on our web site. Interesting some research in Australia with a strong EU connection and heading the same way see http://www.yawlfoundation.org/ .

Get ready it will change the whole distribution model and put business in the driving seat for their applications – that’s what disruptive technology does. A good example is a UK Government contract won by Indian company to build a new application involving people seeking help. Price £50m but thinking people and process should be no more that £5m and all work carried out locally working directly with end users. Because of the speed of build and the inbuilt flexibility there is no longer a requirement to have full specification before build starts. The build is lead by business analyst skills supporting change during build and for continuous improvement making it a future proof investment.

We are just at the start of this journey and more to come. We already have our own cache in memory environment and a comprehensive tag library where in the build linking the user interface to the data source is by mark up not coding. There is no need for a custom data model making change quick and relatively easy. We have in production our own web page development environment using our existing client server one and a pluggable architecture in the tag library for ready access to any data source to be presented on the user form which can be seamlessly incorporated into the end to end process. This will enhance our existing capabilities to communicate with legacy systems and in the future reduce reliance on old systems.

Is this the “silver bullet”? That’s for you to judge but please believe me it works and has been well proven by early adopters as very robust and does deliver exactly as it says on the box and more – unlike most vendors!

Going direct to US is not on our radar screen too difficult with too many enemies. China is……! Let me leave you with a rather profound quote made by Nicolai Machiavelli – 500 years ago
“Nothing is more difficult than to introduce a new order, because the innovator has for enemies all those who have done well under the old conditions and lukewarm defenders in those who may do well under the new”

I welcome your comments and as when you “get this” you will I hope become a convert and perhaps help educate the market that there is hope for business software……?

As for CTO and CIO being completely different roles, this again is something I’ve written at length about, and I disagree entirely with your statement. I’d point, again, to what one actually sees in the real world, where the two terms are used quite often interchangeably. And no, the CTO is not (and must never be) about simply the delivery of technologies, even in companies that strongly differentiate between the two roles.