Abandoning The Past John Wise Founder, CEO The Tyranny of Programmers vs. Programs Writing Programs PWP ® The business of software development, like any business, struggles with letting go of the past. Companies struggle with outdated approaches and sharing the same perception with their peers from less exciting industries. Over the 25 years I have been leading companies engaged in enterprise financial software development, I have seen this manifested in many ways. Perhaps the most significant way is the near tyrannical hold of programmers over product design and development. The argument and tradition is programmers write the software and therefore end up designing the solution. It is obvious when the software is designed by programmers because the design is almost always dreadful. What has changed, and what few software firms have yet recognized, is that programming tools can now be built to be “smart” enough to shift the center of design much closer to the end-users for whom the software is being built, and with common sense, professional designers actually do the design. With a change of approach, it is now possible to give professional designers/business analysts, those who are closest to the client and the use cases that drive application function, primary power over application design. At InvestCloud, our approach is Programs Writing Programs (PWP®), and it not only moves design closer to the professional designer or user but it has two other profound benefits as well: faster time to market and more cost effective solution, and greater opportunity to customize Programs Writing Programs First, PWP® radically reduces the amount of time it takes to build applications. A single business analyst can do in days what would take a group of programmers weeks or months to accomplish at a traditional software company. With PWP® the business analysts can do rapid prototyping of working applications that can be used, tested, and tweaked in days. These are real working applications, not mock-ups. This massively added efficiency means that prototyping becomes so cost effective that many more design outcomes can be tried by a client, which leads to better design results. Second, PWP® makes custom applications, tailored to very specific client workflows, data capture, analytics, business intelligence (we call them applets), become affordable for any size firm. Large banks with large budgets are no longer the only ones with access to sophisticated applications - this represents a
true democratization of software. Evidence of the amount of innovation enabled by this approach can be seen among our own clients. InvestCloud has created over 3,000 custom work-flows and views of data in the last 24 months. Unlike InvestCloud, the traditional enterprise financial software would only have several dozen views of data and not several thousand. The reason, as explained, was because of the cost and inefficiency of using programmers writing code rather than programs writing programs. The Lightning in the Cloud While this is a powerful concept in itself, when taken up into the cloud, it becomes even more powerful. This becomes the “lightning” in the cloud. On a true, multi-tenanted cloud platform like InvestCloud, the benefit of this client innovation can be efficiently shared across the entire client base. Unlike traditional enterprise software where every client is a siloed installation with patches, the client of a true cloud platform share the benefits of a single code base, where functional upgrades are available to all. While there are a number of factors that explain the amazing success that InvestCloud is seeing in the adoption of our platform, we believe that the most important one is PWP® delivered in a multi-tenanted cloud environment. Moving design closer to the real designer and client, making customization truly cost effective for any size firm, and delivering it over a true cloud platform are the factors that we believe constitute the forefront of the future of software development. To do that, we had to begin by abandoning the past. For more information about how InvestCloud’s unique approach to application development and how our Programs Writing Programs (PWP®) is affordable for any size firm, visit us at www.investcloud.com to request a demo. Recently InvestCloud received the distinguished honor of being nominated as a finalist for the GREAT Tech award sponsored by the government of the UK. Please see our short video of John, our founder and CEO discussing PWP® and the radical efficiency it brings to delivering customized, bespoke views and functionality to any size firm, please click on the following link: http://www.iplayerhd.com/playerframe/share/b0113870-9a1d-4a2c-99510c605042cc68 You can read more about the award here: http://news.yahoo.com/ukgovernment-announces-2nd-annual-great-tech-awards-160300281.html John Wise B.Sc (Double Hons), C.Eng, (Chief Executive Officer, InvestCloud Inc.) is a serial financial services technology entrepreneur. John holds a double honors degree in Cybernetics and Computer Science, and is a Chartered Software Engineer in the UK. Since launching InvestCloud in 2010, it has grown to become the leading cloud
application services firm for money managers and advisors in the U.S. John started his career in a research role for International Computers Limited, and was selected by Citibank to launch what is now Temenos. John’s first independent software company ‘Synergo Technology,’ became in 5 years the UK’s leading Agency Brokerage solution with c.40% of the market volume, and in addition was the UK market leader for Institutional Net Settlement with c.90% of the market's customers. After selling Synergo John created TCA Syntec (the first EAI company in Europe), before starting Netik EAI as an international financial messaging and integration company. Netik EAI was the second largest provider of SWIFT messaging in the world. In 2002 Netik was refocused on data warehouse portal solutions which were adopted by leading banks, custodians and prime brokers including Citibank, UBS, PNC, SEI, Fortis, BNP, Scotia and Saudi Stock Exchange. In 2005 Netik was sold to the Bank of New York.