Robert Cooper talked about why he hates BPM products but love BPM: XML is not a programming language! I fully agree on this assertion and you can read about a post (in French) I’ve written on this.
This is true for BPM, but also for many enterprise software (see this post from Ayende about what is an enterprise software): they pretend/tend to be highly customizable to be able to match the enterprise processes without requiring high development skills…this usually true, but the drawback is the maintenance, upgrade and evolution capabilities which are usually also very poor.
I think Designer Oriented Architecture for non-techy (non-techy does not mean “no skill” at all…see later in this post) is not compatible with maintenance, upgrade and evolution capabilities. For the rest of this post and as I’m lasy, I will talk only about maintenance but you can replace by “maintenance, upgrade and evolution”. The incompatibility is simply due to the fact that a non-programmers have in fact development skills but are Morts (see Jemremy’s post which I totally agree on), meaning they have to build/customize applications to fulfil some requirements and they learn/use only what they need to do this: “Mort is a developer who only learns just what he needs to complete his project, on the project”.
Microsoft Visual Studio and .Net framework are addressing this very well. This is in itself not a bad thing, but it prevent maintenance. Evan Hoff catch it in his post. Clearly: Designer Oriented Architecture goes against maintainability…and Enterprise Softwares (or BPM products) have not yet understood this. Today, I’ve seen high level requirements for new Enterprise Software platform for an external company with 3 requirements inside the same slide: “Easy to build quality application” (where quality means testability and maintainability), “High level of extensibility without preventing upgrade” and “Ease tayloring, configure and manage applications”.
I can understand people that are looking for a Ferrari able to do cross over and consuming less than 1liter of fuel per 100 kilometre…but I’m doubtful on the success of the search.
Quality, maintenance, ease of upgrade, evolution capabilities are just incompatible with tayloring done by Mort.