I had a most enjoyable session with Jon Pyke, Chief Strategy Officer with Cordys, Jan Baan's (relatively) new outfit this week. I attended the UK 'coming out' lunch a few months ago but I have to admit that the messaging didn't quite get through to me—although I do find it hard to get my head round things when surrounded by a room full of analysts :-)

The potential interest in and capability of a software vendor that spent 4 years developing a product using 250 engineers before bringing it to market (approx 18 months ago) made me try again though.

Officially, Cordys does business process management, and acknowledges that it competes in the workflow / BPM space—but that doesn't really do it justice—in the same way that today's business intelligence requirements are not adequately described by the traditional definition of BI.

Consider your organisation split into 3 layers—the top being 'the business', where the tasks associated with 'doing business' are executed. The bottom layer is 'the IT' where the automated parts of business processes are executed. Then we have the middle layer:

Cordys plays in this middle layer, which proposes to separate, or decouple, the part of IT which takes process changes from the business layer, and ensures that the underlying IT is able to enable / support / execute them. This isn't a new idea; the likes of Bowstreet, Silverstream and Seebeyond have proposed similar or parts of this in the past, but perhaps without the most appropriate tools to make it work. It could be said these vendors had the right ideas at the wrong time. Cordys might have a chance to make this work though; it is well funded, has customers, and by using web services and SOA principles, makes it look, at least, achievable.

The middle layer has the proposed benefits of being an 'application' that allows:

1. Business people to make changes / create new processes when they are needed, without creating complex work for the IT department.
2. Control over the demand placed on the underlying IT.
3. The concept of reuse and pooled resources.
4. Business flexibility while ensuring that bottle necks and other problems associated with IT change do not occur.

From a strategic point of view, what organisations need to have, in order to gain the confidence to explore this way of approaching enterprise IT is, ultimately, confidence in their IT and in automation technologies in general.

Currently, this places the Cordys approach beyond the comfort zone for the majority of mainstream organisations. That said, its customers, while tending towards the larger end of organisations, are not quite the global giants we expect to see as willing to balance the risk of making changes to their considerable IT estates against the potential benefits it offers. Take this a step further and consider the opposite end of the scale though: a smaller company, with less IT to manage, could take this approach with less effort, and grow with it, rather than altering its strategy when it feels big enough to chance it. If Cordys can get its pricing right, the mid-market offers a significant opportunity.

This type of process centric approach is normally accompanied by phrases such as 'on the fly', and 'empowering the business guy'—both of which are intimidating to say the least to organisations and their IT departments in general. Some more levelled terminology is required, as well as a simple way of demonstrating its capabilities. Cordys's 3+3+3 program is designed to do this by taking a single process and demonstrating the value that applying the 'middle layer approach' can have in a relatively short space of time.

We also need to stop kidding ourselves about the nature of business processes—there are very few real businesses which need to alter their processes every 5 minutes—what the approach proposes is an appropriate level of flexibility so that when needs arise, the business can make changes to how it does things (and thus how the underlying IT supports it) without creating significant work for the IT department.

However, the strength of the strategy is in its application across multiple processes and thus significant swathes, if not all, of the underlying IT estate, due to the economies of scale afforded by reuse and pooling of the process steps created by the Cordys solution (web services) and in treating the underlying IT estate as a pooled resource too.

As mentioned before, the easiest route to demonstrating its value and workability could be to introduce the concept to small organisations, as it is here where the approach could quickly become 'the way things are done', and ready the big companies of the future for the flexible approach to exploiting IT they will undoubtedly need.