Despite all the emerging software engineering and object-oriented tools, systems development has taken a fundamentally wrong turn, Dieter Hieke and Volker Oesinghaus from Plenum Management Consulting in Hamburg, and Hartmut Skubach from the Wiesbaden branch of the same company believe, and they have been outlining their views to Computerwoche, arguing that in spite of concepts liks SAA, and the euphoria that surrounds computer-aided software engineering, efficiency has not really increased. In their opinion, rationalisation potential has now been exhausted and increasing investment in information technology just isn’t justified. In the future, they reckon, the efficiency of companies’ computer divisions will be measured primarily by their ability to react to changes in company policy, and to come up with the necessary finances something for which many companies are nowhere near prepared. Hieke, Oesinghaus and Skubach identify three main factors that are still hampering today’s daat processing departments under-use of the database; deterministic system development; and failure to re-use software building blocks for applications with similar structures which in turn means excessive project development delays. In response, the Plenum consultants suggest that companies should be more conservative and stop seeking to automate everything. There must be a compromise and if a process is automated, certain criteria should be met: the application development should not be deterministic – there should be room for creativity; in developing the system, external influences such as market pressures and new technology should be considered and dealt with at each level; data and processes must be thought of as single objects to reflect reality; and the system architecture must be oriented to the data structures. The consultants admit that these individual concepts are nothing new, but say that in the above combination, the data model-object methodolgy, a means of developing building blocks is presented, which can be flexibly moulded and repeatedly used.
