Posted by Mark de Simone

Platform as a Service – Now and Safely. Executing Continuous Business Process Innovation while retaining Compliance and Control.

As if the game for the IT leader could not get any tougher, a massive increase in pressure for fast business returns, while merging, reorganizing, downsizing is now
being coupled with a maniacal attention to compliance to an ever growing flow of mandatory regulations which need to be met…clearly now.

The model for IT which has governed the architectural and operational discussions as late as 6 months ago is just plainly unsustainable now.

Fortis Bank de-merging from Fortis Belgium and re-merging with ABN-AMRO needs to still deliver customer value, even as these gyrations take place. Citibank still needs to innovate its Treasury and Receivable Services even while re-organizing. KPN wants to grab as much Triple Play services even as its Capex and Opex get dramatically cut.

The only truly acceptable projects to the CFO are those who, besides having an ROI within reason, have a “time to ROI” of 3 months, a payback period of 3 months and 6 months of positive cash ROI for the company’ fiscal year. To the COO and CEO both are holding on to their jobs if they can get the reorganization or merger to be executed fast while retaining control and governance of operations. CEO, COO and CFO all have to accept the various regulatory impositions and execute them within very tight deadlines.

Current application development, deployment and the traditional requirement specification processes can no longer apply.

The need arises for driving any process change, process development and process deployment across and over any application platform within or outside the organization while harnessing any data and application logic. More importantly the need for the business operation people across the company to be able to directly design the processes and change them while IT continues to ensure simultaneously that the needed application access, respect for security and process visibility are strictly adhered to without modifying any application.

Impossible? No it just cannot be done by modifying or developing or installing traditional applications with traditional integration models.

Moving to the era of Platform as a Service.