From The Inside: November/December 2015

The exploration and creation of Next Generation Business Software is on the minds of a lot of business software developers lately. Almost all business software is showing its age. Many applications have been around for 15-20 years, but most of our MultiValue applications have been around for over 30-40. Next Generation Business Software is not just about the client. Nor is it just about the user.

I've been watching what a lot of companies are describing as Next Generation Business Software to see what the trends are while watching how people are tackling the problem of the Monolithic ERP, MRP, and LOB software package. For those who aren't familiar with the acronyms:

• ERP: Enterprise Resource Planning.
• MRP: Manufacture Resource Planning.
• LOB: Line of Business, i.e. accounting, purchasing, invoices systems .

For example, let's look at one of the most popular small business and personal business applications on the market: Quickbooks. It has been available since 1994. It's old enough to drink in most countries. SAP has been around since 1973 but is likely using a version of a core that was written in 2001. That's 15 years old.

Over the years, there have been a lot of changes to the IT industry. Products and features have been bolted-on to keep up with changes in software and user requirements. But very little was changed in the central code of the applications themselves. Keep in mind, I'm not talking about just MultiValue software, but all business software.

Instead of incorporating each feature into an ERP or LOB application suite, software companies bolted-on the cool new abilities. As a result, the core wasn't enhanced, it was burdened with the new requirements. The core application became more complex with each addition. This complexity causes the applications to become more Monolithic, which also meant it became harder to bolt-on each successive change. To truly create new software, there would have to be a fundamental change.

Next Generation Business Software isn't going to be just about the UI or features or UX or cloud or mobile or Internet of Things, or the hundreds of other things that companies say are important. It's going to be about all of it and none of it.

Any one of these things would require flexibility in the core software of the application; the combination of these things will likely push any well-established software past its limits. Developers are running into a wall when trying to update software because the core is too fragile. A true Next Generation application will not only have functional and flexible user experience, but will be flexible in data and application interfaces in its core as well.

Many existing applications already provide easy access to the data through reports, exports, or data mining. However, they don't tend to provide easy access, updates, and manipulation of the core business data and logic. The data flow is, relatively speaking, simplistic. It must go in one way and come out the other. All the alternative accesses being built for bolt-ons are adding complexity, and in some cases are adversely restrictive in how information can be manipulated or accessed.

How will this affect MultiValue business software? In reality, we have more flexibility in our core systems than most other business software does. Additionally, we do not have a separation of core business logic from the data, and the data from the core business logic. This provides us with the basis for the kind of flexibility which doesn't exist in other systems, at least not without major rewrites.

This flexibility provides easy access to statically-stored data and derived data — data generated from the business rules applied to the literal data. For example, a price in your inventory isn't just about cost and margins stored in the database, but also about the supporting information like turns, vendor costing, promotional pricing, and ROI. All this is calculated/analytic data. MultiValue allows us to determine this metadata on-the-fly.

Another example of this is order creation. You need to have access to workflows that drive that order through the business systems, not just "how to save the information to disk" so that you can run meaningful reports against it.

Workflows change the data depending on where you are in the process: The creation of an order drives warehousing and inventory data alterations; customer requests or complaints drive inventory controls and clearances; back-orders drive website e-commerce data; e-commerce data and social media feeds drive purchasing of products and future inventory sell-off; raw material purchasing drives product availability and manufacturing production hours; sales data from mobile interfaces drive production rescheduling.

Creating new UI for consumers or employees cannot be done properly if the core application doesn't provide the underlying flexibility to the client interface. This isn't about simply updating data anymore, but about responding to changes in the dynamics which drive the business, and therefore, drive the application logic.

In this article, I've hit on a lot of little topics that might seem separate, but in reality are linked together to make a game-changing whole. I will be talking about the overall concept in more detail during the upcoming 2016 Conference, so make sure to join me there.

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Nov/Dec 2015