Jeremy Payne

Reading, UK

Director of marketing Europe, Pegasystems

So, businesses are delaying technology upgrades in response to the credit crunch.

No great revelation perhaps at the findings of the latest NCC survey. Yet it does beg a more fundamental question: is necessity proving to be the mother of invention here as companies look to struggle on with legacy applications, or is it simply something they should all have been doing anyway?

Business Process Management offers a case in point. An intuitive rules-based BPM engine linked to a common servicing backbone is designed to sit over the existing infrastructure and extend the use and life of existing applications. And as an investment, it will not break the bank in delivering real lasting change.

Equally importantly, it provides a new level of business agility, in two ways. First, it will enable the organisation to start small and quickly roll out to other parts of the business, using common processes and lessons learned. Second, it is no longer the exclusive preserve of the IT department: by involving the business from the start in delivering change, decision-makers can respond fast to whatever their customers and the financial markets can throw at them.

And with the market responding positively to the benefits of Software-as-a-Service, all of this can be achieved with a risk-free BPM Platform-as-a-Service model which offers a unique level of integration, security, visibility and reliability.

So maybe it’s RIP to rip and replace. If so, perhaps the lessons learned may be one small plus to emerge from the current commercial turmoil.