To quote Peter Drucker: "The most important, and indeed the truly unique, contribution of management in the 20th century was the 50-fold increase in productivity of the manual worker in manufacturing. The most important contribution management needs to make in the 21st century is similarly to increase the productivity of knowledge work and the knowledge worker."

Unfortunately, to date, our efforts to improve the productivity of this increasingly important segment of the organization have been less than spectacular. As is pointed out in a recent study by the Center for High Performance and its parent company Hudson Highland Group Inc. ("Unlock Corporate Performance: America's Knowledge Workers Provide The Key") a "performance crisis" has hit Corporate America, hindering its ability to shake off the effects of the sluggish economy and return to sustainable growth.

For organizations to achieve peak performance, they will need to dramatically change the way in which their information systems are built. Fortunately, we are rapidly approaching a breakthrough in the way applications are developed and managed that will facilitate this change. A number of individual factors, including the proliferation of Web services, are working together to create this breakthrough.

The Tipping Point
In his book The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell searches for catalysts that precipitate a "tipping point" - that moment in time when the boiling point is reached. This concept holds that small changes will have little or no effect on a system until a critical mass is reached. Then one final small change "tips" the system and a large effect is observed.

One example of this phenomenon is the establishment of e-mail as a primary means of doing business. Although personal computers in business had been around in various forms since the early 1980s, they were not seen as primary means of communication. In order for that to change, several factors had to occur: PC prices had to come down low enough to place them on every desktop; users had to become more comfortable with their use to incorporate them into their daily routines; network technology had to improve to the point where internal connections extended throughout the organization; a public network (the Internet) had to be established to allow external point-to-point communication; and easy-to-use e-mail software had to be created. The tipping point came when e-mail software was on enough desktops to drive further adoption. Suddenly, if you didn't have e-mail you were out of touch, and unable to conduct business the way the rest of the world was conducting it.

Today, technology has become so ingrained in the daily life of business users that their requests for automated solutions far outstrip IT's ability to deliver them all. One of the consequences of this is that many users have resorted to creating their own solutions using desktop tools (for example, creating macros in spreadsheets to perform repetitive calculations). The problem with this is that these systems are isolated from the rest of the organization, and the tools used to build them are often ill-suited to the task at hand. But we are moving toward a tipping point, and the change will be swift and sudden. Key drivers toward this point are Web services and service-oriented architectures (SOAs). These new concepts will enable solutions developed by and for a single business user to be easily extended to others in the organization. All that is needed to reach the tipping point is the right tool built on these concepts - a personal service builder (PSB).

The impact of PSBs will be profound. Before spreadsheets came along, for example, financial analysts had to get IT to develop a system for them in order to automate their work. Today, the thought of outsourcing a spreadsheet to the IT department seems absurd. The same will be true of many new kinds of systems that will be developed by users using PSBs.

From IT Department to IT-Savvy Organization
One of the keys to the tipping point being reached is the willingness and growing ability of business users to computerize their own part of the business. This is rapidly leading to what can be called the "IT-savvy" organization. In this new organization, responsibility for IT will go from being solely the domain of the IT department to being a responsibility shared by (nearly) everyone within the organization.

This idea is a radical departure from the current norm, where practically all development projects are controlled by IT. Just the thought of giving users the ability to develop applications, no matter how small, outside the umbrella of IT is enough to give CIOs nightmares. Indeed, because (unlike spreadsheets, for example) the applications developed by users will become part of the organization's portfolio (they won't remain isolated on desktops), there needs to be an overall platform, controlled by IT, that assures compliance with standards and security. In addition, IT has a critical role to play in providing PSBs secure and easy access to the information contained in legacy applications.

Why the IT-Savvy Organization is Necessary
Creating an IT-savvy organization addresses one of the great conundrums of the current IT landscape: the mandate to do more with fewer resources. Since organizations began to prioritize cost containment over innovation, IT budgets have been shrinking. Yet there has been a marked increase in demand for new applications, both large and small. Getting business users involved in automating their own job functions frees IT resources for the more complex, detailed work that affects larger numbers of users. Essentially, this concept extends the IT department to include the whole company. Users have the need and the desire, and given the right tools they have the ability. Let's look at each of these factors in more detail.

The Need
Nicholas Carr's famous (or infamous, depending on your point of view) article in the Harvard Business Review, "IT Doesn't Matter," claimed that IT is no longer viewed as a business advantage, but instead has become more of a commodity in the way electricity has. While many photons have been burned arguing both sides of the case, the one core truth behind it is that having technology alone is not enough. It's not a question of whether your company's business functions are computerized and your competitors' are not.

The big difference now is the time frame for development. When technology was seen as a strategic advantage, organizations were willing to invest huge amounts of resources and wait months to roll out a major initiative. They felt the long-term payoff was worth the short-term wait. Today, with IT being viewed as a means to cost savings rather than competitive advantage, those time frames have been compressed. Business users want the advantages technology can offer now, not six months from now.

Complicating this scenario is the fact that in recent years 75% of new application projects have come in over-budget or later than projected, with many applications scrapped before they are deployed. There are many reasons for it, including users changing their requirements in mid-stream and general shifts in the business landscape such as the increase in globalization.

As the pace continues to increase, the old methods of developing applications to address the whole of the business from end to end become increasingly difficult to justify. There is an undeniable need to change the way technology is developed and rolled out in order to keep pace with the way business now operates.

The Desire and the Ability
When computers were first introduced into the workplace, they were viewed as mysterious and intimidating by many business users. Those users learned the functionality by rote, and never strayed from what they'd been taught. It's hard to believe now, but I can remember when programmers had fun with user naivete by telling them not to drop the disk drives because the data would fall off! Users could be kept in line by telling them they could wipe out the entire organization's records with a single incorrect command (and in some cases they probably could). The users back then were therefore certainly reluctant to experiment or discover new capabilities on their own.

The current generation of business users has no such qualms. The older group has been using computers as part of their jobs for the past 20 years, and now give them no more thought than they do the telephone or copier. Younger workers are even more comfortable with them, having never known a time without computers, and having played with digital toys since the age of three. Many learned basic programming skills in high school or even middle school, and manipulated functions in applications even before that.

In their jobs, both groups use computers to create database queries, set up spreadsheets to perform complex calculations across multiple worksheets, and do multiple other tasks on a daily basis without any experience with Java, Visual Basic, or other programming languages. At home, they create Web sites for their personal interests, despite the fact that they know nothing about HTML.

They do all of these things by choice - and because they now have the ability. Consider the database query. A few years ago, setting up a database query would have required submitting a request to IT and waiting a week to two weeks for an IT staffer to code it. Now they use intuitive tools to create the query themselves and are able to obtain the results immediately. The technology has advanced to the point where they're able to create these applications for themselves, without IT intervention.

Moving the Concept Forward
The next logical step is to create an environment where the services created by users can become part of a larger enterprise "application." That's what PSBs are designed to do. They give business users the ability to create services that solve their immediate needs, yet may be combined with services from other users to address larger issues. Think of those Russian nesting dolls. The smallest is an individual service. The largest is the enterprise's IT system. Services created with PSBs are able to cascade in the same way to create both of those layers, and all the layers in between.

So what exactly is a PSB? One way to think of it is as a development environment that lets business users create simple applications with techniques such as mind mapping instead of writing code - or depending on IT to write the code. Those business users know their jobs very well. They know what they need to do it better. But unless they've taken programming courses, they've lacked the knowledge of how to translate their ideas into something practical. Now, business users simply need to understand the logic - A follows B follows C - and then map it out with the PSB. The rest happens behind the scenes.

As opposed to today's monolithic and inflexible applications, the new PSB-based model is designed to match the way business operates. Business is not a static entity, but rather a series of constantly occurring and evolving events. Today's events may continue, or they may be replaced by other events. With the PSB-based model, users are able to react immediately to changes in their business environment and develop new services as the need arises. Placing these services into an SOA controlled by IT allows those new services to be shared easily with others. Once the standards are in place, the organization can become more agile, thus gaining a true business advantage over slower-reacting competitors. At this point, IT has again become an advantage - not for its own sake, but for what it enables business users to do.

Unlocking the Potential
PSBs are one key to unlocking the potential of business users to create a more effective, more efficient corporation that the Hudson Highland Group details in their report, because PSBs do for business development what programs such as Microsoft Front Page did for Web site building. They provide the tools that allow business users to create many of the services they need without coding or worrying about technical infrastructure. Business users are thus able to apply their knowledge to solve many of the challenges facing the organization - including the pervasive need to reduce costs - while relieving IT of the burden of supporting numerous smaller user requests. As a result, IT is free to focus on bigger picture issues that affect the entire organization.

We are at the tipping point for the next revolution in IT; SOA-based PSBs will push us over the edge. As they grow in use, they will dramatically change our perceptions of IT. Cycle times will be reduced or even eliminated in some cases, replaced by an ongoing interest in development. Entire systems will change over, but will do so on an ad hoc basis, much as the river remains constant but the water within it changes. In the end, PSBs will help us realize the vision of the high performance corporation, and create a new era in IT.

Author Bio
Jonathan Sapir is president of InfoPower Systems, Inc., developers of SnapXT, an event-driven, service-oriented, rapid application development and deployment platform. jasapir@infpwr.com.