Imagine a world where a line of business can quickly author & maintain an application to support their business goals without (or minimal) intervention from IT. In essence, IT is the platform provider and the business - a practitioner or a business analyst, can put the application together by authoring business rules, calculations engines, presentation and more. Accounting & Consulting firms are utilizing this metaphor today:

  • IT is providing Excel and Excel Services (SharePoint)
  • A practitioner or a business analyst is writing an application in Excel and then publishing it to SharePoint using Excel Services
  • The business can easily maintain the application by opening the Excel file on the SharePoint server and making necessary changes

Advantages:

  • Eliminate or reduce IT intervention in building Line of Business application. Change the role of IT to a platform provider
  • Reducing development effort contributes to cost savings and quicker turnaround time as the business analyst does not need to capture requirements for a developer and can directly author business logic.
  • Being able to capture, manage and protect the firm's intellectual property

Examples of Line of Business application authored by the business:

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