BEA woos nontechies with new software

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marketing director to alter the company's business processes may be technically feasible, but not necessarily advisable. A simple change could trigger technical problems, such as overloaded systems or security lapses. Also, there may not be clear roles and responsibilities for defining or changing business processes within an organization.

BEA expects that sales of the software will require a large amount of education around "IT governance," or rules and procedures regulating how and when changes can be made.

"One of the things we're going to be challenged with is how we make sure the things that people can do are limited to what makes sense, and really designing an application so that it can be changed by business users," said Jim Rivera, director of technology at BEA.

"A line of business users can take a look at what's going on in an application, get visibility into the process, and actually affect some change in the business," Rivera said.

For example, a business analyst could use work-flow tools to look at the progress of a claims-processing system. If a bottleneck in the process occurs, the person could cut out an unnecessary approval step or reassign people to the task.

The adoption of service-oriented architectures--a software design method for sharing and combining modular programs, or "services"--helps bring business users into the realm of software development, Rivera said.

Once a company defines its services in terms that a businessperson can understand, such as purchase order verification service, it becomes feasible for business users to "wire together" prewritten services. BEA's intent is to allow businesspeople to make changes through a configuration tool, rather than touching the actual Java code, Rivera said.

Several specialized software companies as well as larger companies

[smabres]

Nonsense

I really don't understand BEA, it is nonsense, have you ever seen a spreadsheet made by business annalist?

[JonyR]

New Brand

I can suggest a name for the new brand: Silver Bullet