Letter from Mark McGregor, Managing Director, Popkin Software & Systems Ltd, responding to our article Rational after Pure Atria puts product plans into production (CI No 3,242).
Whilst the focus of the piece was Rational’s views and plans, they do have a significant impact on users. It is interesting that Devlin and Schurr feel that the market is not ready for end to end solutions (especially given that the end customer for each tool may be a different part of development or database management organization) Ever since the beginning of the CASE tool market, users have intimated that this is exactly what they would like. Historically, neither CASE tools or other technologies have been able to deliver this. The nearest we came was with the old style I-Case products, which whilst at least trying to address the need met with heavy user resistance, especially from programmers. We are now at a stage where CASE and other tool vendors are forming closer partnerships and do accept that no man is an island. In order to deliver end to end solutions vendors have to work together. At the same time users are accepting that their development departments have to deliver the systems the business requires, and that to mange this effectively they need to forge links between Business Processes, Object Oriented Development and Data Modeling/management. Failure to listen to these messages may well drive some tools vendors out of business and simply play into the hands of the package solution vendors, to whom poor business to IT communications are a good selling point. Leaving only a market for business process modeling. The company does not plan repository level integration, outside of supporting whatever Microsoft develops. Having said that users want to bring the many facets of their business together, they in most cases (especially management) would like to gain the benefits of re-use. This sharing of knowledge is best handled by a repository. Enabling management to understand and report on the information. Also allowing analysts and developers to work together in teams. Witness the explosion of Data Warehousing and Data Mining as a business tool, why should the IT department be any different? Again failure to listen will result in business disillusionment with the concept of using tools. Devlin concedes Rational is still struggling with the idea of whether data modeling must be part of the product portfolio. It is generally accepted that over 90% of today’s OO systems still rely on relational databases for storage. It should then, almost be a duty for tools vendors to take this into account and deliver tools that can help with the whole problem. These points are important and have an impact on the modeling industry in general and certainly on the users who have to deliver solutions with the technology. The idea of a purist or idealist approach does nothing to further IT in the eyes of their business colleagues. It does however highlight what many business people think, that is that communications between different development disciplines is non-existent.
