The Business Agility Blog

Ever notice how the youngest people in an organization know all the cool tech tricks and secretly scoff at your unavoidably outdated methods? There was a time when you were the graphics wizard, making slide shows that blew clients away, but those times are long gone and an entire generation of baby boomer offspring is happy to show you why. In order to harness the genius of these bright minded, caffeinated tech-junkies, Mendix has set up the Mendix University Program.

Business Engineering 101

This program brings the Mendix platform to the classroom, allowing business information students to create highly functional applications in no time. The idea here is to find a synergy between brilliant university students and a fast growing software company. Students, in addition to class credit and real world experience, get to try a platform made with business people in mind. By cutting out the endless coding, students can focus on the business problem they’re trying to address and how they can use technology to solve it.

Tomorrow’s Business Analyst

On the other side of the equation, at Mendix we take feedback from students and professors extremely seriously. Mendix University Program manager, Chris Kober, explains: “Todays business information students are the future advocates and users of our products and our platform, their opinions are invaluable to us. Part of the reason we are located in Cambridge is that we have the smartest students in the world within walking distance.”

Ivy League only, for now

Although the program is aimed at Ivy League schools for now, the company plans to grow this initiative indefinitely. Any university offering a degree in information technology or business administration can be a part of the fun, and it usually doesn’t take very long for professors and students to become supporters.

Sign up for a whirlwind tutorial during one of our monthly Mendix Essentials or Webinar sessions, just enough to get your creative juices flowing.

A “What If” question for business analysts and IT professionals…

What if it suddenly became very easy for someone to do both your job and their own, at the same time? If history provides any forecast for the future of IT, we are likely to see some interesting changes in the way human capital is managed – especially for those of us involved in the emergence of cloud computing. Clouds push complexity to the background and allow users to focus on what really matters: functionality and costs.

Have you ever noticed how the education we receive often sets boundaries in our career aspirations? We are trained to do something, and do it well – but in doing so, we take for granted the fact that others are doing the same thing in a different field. Then, when we are faced with an inevitable change, we instinctively take a “That’s not what I’ve been trained to do, there are other people for that” mentality. Sure, there are the motivated few who push down boundaries and become renaissance men and women in their own right. But when everyone else is set in their ways, these people are often considered a risk… think: too many eggs in one basket.

Now, to regress from my pseudo-philosophical banter, this trend is becoming all the more apparent as business analysts become more involved in technical training. Most IT veterans would say that business analysts will never have the true know-how to implement their plans, requirements and recommendations. The modern business analyst usually considers themselves more of a problem solver than a programmer – hence the separation of labor in this function of any business. Having surveyed the blogosphere for opinions of business analysts and IT professionals, there seems to be a live (and even a bit emotional) discussion between those who say it is a natural, and therefore inevitable, progression and those who say it is a “pie in the sky” and that it will never happen.

Contrastingly, a growing population of believers has something to say about the segregation of business and IT. In a world of zeros and ones, the innumerable coding languages can only become more and more efficient. As coding languages are continuously created, survival of the fittest can account for the extinct languages of modern programming. An abstraction of these languages is an ongoing phenomenon with a light at the end of the tunnel. Some say that using abstract, visual and human-readable models instead of low-level code is a very important step towards commoditized coding.

I’ve come to think about this abstraction phenomenon as measure to increase efficiency. When our ancestors realized that making bricks was faster than packing sand, they were on to something similar. If someone else uses molds to make perfectly shaped bricks that can be built into any structure, the workers need different skills but can ultimately build more economically, the architect can plan more accurately, and the buyer can move in earlier. So, why deal with sand when we can get the bricks from vendors elsewhere. Why deal with code, when we can get software modules elsewhere? This, my friends, may be the future of today’s business analyst.  In the future, what if business analysts had the skill set and the molds to create bricks that satisfy their requirements without the need to deal with code – or sand?