When implementing a new business application, most organizations feel they need to choose between “build” versus “buy”. Building your own application means everything is possible, but building complex applications is a risky venture. Buying a standard application provides all the advantages of pre-configuration, but has limited flexibility. Although most organizations prefer standard applications, they end up adapting them, leading to high cost of ownership, and long change cycles.
However, a third approach has emerged, reconciling the differences between build and buy. Model-driven applications come with an out-of-the-box configuration, as would be expected of a packaged business application, yet it can be adapted without development effort.
The main characteristic of a model-based application is that the business rules and business logic are not stored within the application, but are defined, stored and maintained in a user-accessible repository. Making changes in that repository then automatically leads to changes in the application.
The paper focuses on strategy, organization and cultural aspects of managing model-driven business applications, such as Be Informed.
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Published in 2011.