Micro-Applications for Business Process Management

A significant problem facing corporate IT today is the vast numbers of power-user and end-user developed business applications written in Notes, ColdFusion, MS-Access or Excel.  Why do the end-users continue to build these micro-applications?   Because the high costs and effort required to customize the IT supported major systems such as ERP, PDM and CRM, prevent IT from helping the users cope with the rapidly changing requirements for business process and data automation at the divisional or departmental level.   The proliferation of micro-applications however is in direct conflict with IT’s goal of consolidating applications and reducing the number of software vendors, and is creating an ever increasing support and security problem.

Walk into any typical corporate setting and you will find that end-users and departmental IT groups have developed hundreds of “micro-applications”, each mission critical to that department, that are used to run the day to day business.    The micro-applications are not well supported (i.e. backups, security, future customizations, and upgrades) and eventually all these applications fall back to corporate IT to support, creating a support nightmare.    In a recent discussion with a corporate IT executive ($100B company) the current policy is to forbid development of the micro-applications.  He admits though that many hundreds of department-level applications are running rogue throughout the organization outside of IT control and consequently not kept current with security best practices. When the SQL Slammer virus hit the Internet, numerous unsupported and un-patched micro-application databases at the company were impacted.  These types of IT issues are repeatedly identified in articles and blogs like the ITtoolbox blog posting Is IT aware of the SAP users problems?

Because of the necessity to use enterprise software to achieve business goals, it is no longer possible (or perhaps even advisable) for Corp IT to prevent the development of these micro-applications.   A change in strategy is needed.   Corporate IT should provide a manageable, low cost framework for the local IT groups and power users to use to deploy the solutions they need, that achieves the supportability of a common platform, single logon, a consistent development style, and common SOA interface with the major corporate IT systems.  While it is not possible to prevent the development of these micro-applications, it is advisable to provide a productive, supportable environment for these programmers.

I believe that you can’t stop the development of micro-applications, but with the right approach, you can control and channel it. The power and proliferation of the Microsoft technologies gives companies a common platform and Microsoft enterprise open source can provide a common SOA based option for micro-applications that is easy to work with while maintaining Corp IT standards for supportability.

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