For years, everything has been moving to computers. But it hasn’t always been easy.
Many things about computers are highly technical, densely interrelated and generally frustrating. For businesses, it takes a lot of money to dive deeply into technology. Companies spend a material percentage of their budgets on IT-related products and services.
The way the process works, you have business people who know what they want to accomplish, you have analysts who translate that into something systematic, and then highly trained developers labor for hours producing it.
But that’s all changing.
Remember when there used to be secretaries and typists? Today, word processors and e-mail empower everyone to type their own correspondence and documents.
The same thing is happening with software.
I talk to people almost every day who are neither trained programmers, nor can they afford a team of trained programmers. But they might be a great sales person or a great business person, or just work in a company where there is a huge need for a programmer.
Those folks want to develop a web application. They may want to deploy it for their department, for their boss or because they think they can make money from it.
In five years, almost everyone will be able to build a decent web application.
How will that change the world?
It will make businesses radically more efficient. It will make people’s jobs more fulfilling because they won’t have to do as much drudge work. And it will free a larger percentage of business profit and loss for things like marketing or sales.
And it will allow businesses to explore their own uniqueness, rather than having to conform to the middle of the bell curve sold by today’s software vendors.
The future is going to be much more diverse, and much more interesting.
What do you think?
Treff LaPlante is president and CEO of Carlisle-based WorkXpress.
This was originally posted on the Central Penn Business Journal Gadget Cube.
