Why would you develop a new system from scratch yourself and have the hassles of maintaining it, when you can buy standard off the shelf software that does the job?  Well, actually because the off the shelf solutions don’t do the whole job, are expensive to modify, and organisations tend to develop ad hoc, manual or Excel based systems around the edges to provide a complete solution, and things can fall down the cracks.

I was watching the dialogue on AccManPro with the 34 minute time and expenses app.  Now that I’ve seen it, I can confirm that a business analyst with some knowledge of Thingamy will easily be able to create new applications in this kind of timescale.  In the application build environment you create the business objects you need, with the appropriate properties. 

You define the workflow of how they will be presented and used, with appropriate ownership, characteristics, meta data and tagging.  You define the logic of how they are going to be used and reported on.  The underlying technology is Thingamy’s own object oriented database which defines the containers and classes and workflows behind the scenes.  Underneath the product has a kernel of code, the aforementioned OO database, a web server and talks XML to it’s own interfaces or the outside world, but lets ignore the  technology for the moment.

This product challenges the business owner to do, as Sigurd explained, “Sim Business” and model his organisation’s processes, in the way my daughter models life with Sim City on her PSP.  Sigurd argues that you should be defining your processes from their various starting points in the business, and tagging them so they are easy to access and find, rather than burying them in a traditional menu hierarchy.  This is a radical approach to solving business process problems, and the technology enables an “Extreme Programming” approach to solution building. 

The business analyst will be able to prototype the required new application in a minutes or hours rather than days and weeks, but then the prototype will be available to go in to production straight away.  The solution can be refined as you go, or evolve and change in line with the way the business needs to develop.  I’m very excited by this technology, and I’ll be working with Sigurd as he finishes the product and brings it to market properly.  The costs are not yet finalised, but will be charged on a monthly, per user basis, and are likely to be similar in cost of ownership to MS Office.  The current interface is workable, but
Sigurd knows it needs significant attention.  He is focusing his development resources on making the logic and scope of the product work first. 

I can also see problems coming with corporate IT, where they will be confused because the underlying database is “not Oracle” and “not Microsoft”.  He has done his own thing for sound reasons to do with performance and scalability.  Sigurd is very much the evangelist, who believes that organisations should start with a clean sheet of paper and model their processes from scratch.  I think that many organisations won’t want to do that.  They will have existing, core applications that work, that they won’t want to throw away. 

Currently, to integrate to those applications can be done, but will require some systems integration expertise and programming.  I believe Sigurd needs to produce some APIs to make it easy to exchange data and integrate with existing solutions.  This would be a compromise, reducing some of the benefit of having all of the data and business objects defined in Thingamy’s schemas, but more than outweighed by the convenience of having Thingamy work with existing infrastructure.  If he can do that, I can see how the product could become a tool of choice, regularly used to build comprehensive, robust solutions to replace all of those ad hoc, semi manual systems and spreadsheets. 

I can also see how Thingamy will be introduced like the Trojan horse in to an organisation to solve a particular application problem, and then spread like (a friendly virus?) wildfire. Technorati Tags : thingamy, ERP, CRM, Accounting, Office, Excel, development, BPM, workflow Powered By Qumana   [link] [...]