The Changing Face of Application Development

IT organizations are in a new era. The boom times marked by soaring budgets for Y2K and Euro projects and the heady dot-com era are over. A changing economy has caused businesses to focus on maximizing the value and effectiveness of IT investments, while controlling costs. These new business expectations create a variety of challenges for business and IT to build and deploy effective Web server-based applications.

Business Demands

The good news is that most businesses are now aware that the capabilities of the IT organization to build and deploy Web server-based applications are vital to competing and thriving in this highly competitive world. This perception of the value of IT is tempered by a need to ensure that projects are prioritized based on their value to the business. Instead of looking for projects that promise exotic new markets, the priority today is for those that have clearly defined deliverables and provide a measurable ROI.

The business expectation is for IT to help the company achieve competitive advantages. Development projects that improve customer service and integrate information from across the enterprise are still high on the business agenda. Aligning IT with these new business demands is critical for success.

Challenges for E-Business Development

IT challenges have never been greater. Risk reduction is a key IT objective. At the same time, service levels and measurable ROIs are essential components of communications between IT and the business. IT must also consider how to maximize its value to the organization. Ultimately, focusing on the right projects is important, but IT must also deliver quality applications that benefit the entire business.

Control over complexity is also crucial. New technologies are arriving at an accelerating pace. Key technology focus areas today include:

Portals: Enterprise portals are now the standard browser-based vehicles to deliver enterprise information.

Web services: Integrating enterprise systems is a required foundation to support new portal, wireless, and other initiatives.

Wireless: Full-time access to production business systems is increasingly demanded for mobile employeesand customers

The IT organization must embrace these new technologies and evaluate a wide range of other new technologies, such as enhanced Linux servers and new generations of development tools. In all of these cases, successful implementations must be controlled from the perspective of the entire infrastructure.

For many years, IT professionals have worked to improve development processes and apply new technologies to benefit enhanced Web server-based application development. These well-known initiatives are reflected in Computer Aided Software Engineering (CASE), object oriented, and component development tools and others. Although each of these has contributed positively to enhanced Web server-based application development, managing the overall development process is as important as the technology and tools that are used to build the systems.

The Software Engineering Institute (SEI) is a federally funded research and development center committed to the evolution of software engineering processes. The SEI developed what is known as the Software Capability Maturity Model (SW-CMM), which defines process models for software development projects. It is an excellent example of an innovative initiative to help software organizations improve the maturity of their software development processes.