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Program your Business Applications the smart way

Do you know what are the differences between a programmer in general and a business applications programmer?

For those of us that we don't understand those differences, life took the change to present the results of that ignorance. So, we try hard to build business applications, to maintain them and to support them. In addition to those, the applications that we deliver are most of the time approximations of the "real life" of the business that we program.

Don't be surprised! In reality our applications are "static snapshots" of the business in question and not "live runs" of what is going on there. Those of us that have try to build business procedures they understand what I mean.

Let's now analyze what is a business in general, in order to find the source of our mistakes. So, a business is an alive organism that is characterized by the following facts:

1.	It consists of humans, named employees.

2.	It owns resources.

3.	It may spanned to more than one (and distant) locations.

4.	Every employee has one or many roles as is defined in the organogram.

5.	Various procedures of consecutive steps that engage a number of employees run into the business.

6.	The consecutive steps of procedures supply forms to the employees in order to fill them up.

7.	Some expertise (business logic) required from employees while filling up the forms.

8.	The forms write their data to the business's archives (disks).

9.	The procedures leave their trails (historical data) to the business's archives (disks).

For the above, by facts defined, business organization the boss (our customer, do not ever forget it!) want's in general the following:

10.	To know at any time what activities are assigned to each employee. Live!

11.	To know for a period of time the activities and the degree of effectiveness of every employee.

12.	To know the path for any of the business procedures and the employees that are engaged.

13.	To be alarmed for critical situations.

14.	To be constantly informed about critical data.

15.	To have reports that show the path (bad or good) of his business.

I think that everybody agree's that every (and I mean every) business can be characterized by the above "green" sentences. If I made a mistake or something important I missed please advice me (rafael<at>kosmosbos.com).

Let's see what our programs can do for the businesses of our customers. I think that I am not wrong if I state that in most situations we support items (8, 9(hardly) and 15). Seriously every of us let's have a thought about what "covers" of the above "green" sentences.

And we try so hard! Why?

Because the tools we are using are wrong!

Most of us we study in colleges and universities. There the tool that they gave us to program was a tool that was perfect for algorithmic computations. But business reality is not only algorithmic computations. In reality this is a very small part of our work in business programming. Businesses everyday life if full of processes and we try to fight them by using computational procedures tools!

The more informed of us (understanding this disadvantage) try to adapt, next to our "college time" programming language, additional tools that support Business Process Management (BPM), Business Activity Monitoring (BAM), Business Rules Management System (BRMS) and Document Management (DM).

Those additional tools assembled with the (college time) programming language give the informed business application programmer the opportunity to support all the "green" facts that we mentioned above.

But trying to orchestrate all those tools is a big task of its own. And what about time for the customer needs (don't forget ever our source of money). So my friends, remember always to:

Concentrate on your customer's needs. Don't waste time on technology issues.

Now the above can be achieved because we can present the proper tool to fight back all those business issues. Now take your time to hear the business procedure your customer describes and code it immediately, nearly word by word. Yes, there is no misreading. Now business procedures can be programmed as they were usual algorithmic procedures.

Make your customer happy by giving him a live picture of what is going on now, in real time, into his business. Give him the opportunity to measure employees and resources efficiency. Track down every business activity, live.

Build programs that alarm your customer for business critical situations and keep him well informed.

Time is needed only for your customers businesses. The situation of using different software tools, trying to adapt them and inventing technics to emulate business processes is something that must lost in the past...

Now kosmos AutoPilot can cover, right out of the box, technologies like:

Form Designing

Report Building

Database Programming,

Business Process Management (BPM),

Business Activity Monitoring (BAM),

Business Rules Management System (BRMS),

Document Management,

Company Organogram,

...

Using Software Agents

Running in real 3 tier architecture

Download now, completely free, the kosmos AutoPilot Developer, the Developer that makes the life of the application programmer easy, and run it against an MS-Access or MS-SQL Server database.

Use for example the known Northwind.mdb (from here) to have a test drive.

1 ) If you want to see a more detailed table of problems and solutions see here.

2 ) Download also our demo applications to see how a "business procedure" becomes "lines of code".

3 ) If you are interested in more arguments about the inefficiencies of usual programming tools and the solution kosmos AutoPilot offers you can read also:

When everyone's tool is a hammer how you can explain that not all problems are nails?

and

Tell a story

If you have any question feel free to contact. Even you can send us the "description" of a procedure (like the quoted text in the car service procedure) and we will send you back the small application with the appropriate coordinator agent. Note that in this case you must permit us to publish the small application.

Rafael J. Pavlides

Programmer

rafael<at>kosmosbos.com