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I’ve just read an interesting opinion piece in British Computing mag by Martin Butler.

He contends that the IT industry has “lost sight of its primary goal of reducing information management costs” and allowed IT estates to become way too complex.

I agree and I know countless operational people, the customers of IT, who are exasperated not only at the complexity of their IT, but perhaps more importantly the amount of time and money it now takes to make even the simplest of changes.

Martin’s anecdotal evidence of people resorting to spreadsheet management, or “passing around bits of paper” is depressing and as he points out, not the answer.

The reason I am interested in this subject is that Blue Prism is pioneering a new concept in computing aimed at simplifying corporate IT and the way it is interpreted and used by the business.

Freeing the business operation to fulfil its own integration and automation needs, and start hammering the growing IT change list is one thing.  But doing that with workarounds like spreadsheets or bits of paper or hiring temporary staff is ungoverned, insecure and not exactly scalable.  Blue Prism proposes an IT supported software platform, supported by a thorough methodology that business users can work within to make sense of the complexity, improve service, manage ongoing change, and above all reduce costs.

We call this an Operational Agility Platform, but the idea of operational agility is far from limited to Blue Prism.  As Martin suggests, there is evidence of a movement emerging “a revolt is under way”.  I prefer to think of it in the passive voice as a revolution as I don’t support the notion that operational people are revolting!