A major shift is under way in the world of computing and at the center are the end user who have proven they can and will use software to create applications, not just use applications. The war between CIOs and end users was fought over Excel and end users won. They proved that those who mastered the ability to solve their own problems worked more effectively and garnered enough power in the enterprise to keep Excel in the trenches. The recent surge of research and dialogue surrounding end user programming, web authoring, mashups, and now the idea of “process mashups” is a response to this trend. There is an emerging opportunity to serve millions of people at work and at home with a better application development environment than Excel.
So who is going to reap the rewards from delivering “application building” to everyone? Or is the question is moot and will Excel just expand to claim the title? I predict that whoever creates the best end user “mashup glue” that can flexibly combine disparate data sources and processes will inherit the earth.
The gluing environment may end up with a name like a “business process spreadsheet” or some other term with the word spreadsheet in it. Not that it will look anything like a spreadsheet, but spreadsheet has semantically taken on the meaning of “programming” in the minds of millions of people who don’t call the spreadsheets they build “applications.” I’ve seen a bunch of different terms in discussions of the topic including: enterprise mashups, process mashups, BPM 2.0, and composite application. But I haven’t consistently seen a noun to describe the authoring and development environment like “mashup spreadsheet.”
The same edge-versus-center tension has happened in the realm of business solutions. The greatest amount of value that Lotus Notes ever provided, besides the email infrastructure, was as a rapid application development platform that people at the edge of the organization - in a business unit - could use to whip up an application that solved their problem instantly. Just-in-time, disposable solutions. As Notes was more embraced as central infrastructure, IT buyers demanded that end-user design capabilities be re-shaped to target the needs of professional developers. Notes environments became "locked down", and people closest to the needs lost their ability to do "self-service" solution development. With Groove, we've brought that back.
The last time I walked around a trading floor, the data displays were dismally behind the times. In an era where real time networked first person shooter games run at breakneck speeds on a $500 Dell box, why does it appear that so little attention has been paid to building dense data displays and custom dashboards for the financial pros who have a critical need for data absorption and comprehension?
Flash is the clear choice for building custom, interactive displays for all kinds of data. But you don’t see many hedge funds and trading desks posting jobs for Flash engineers. Why not? Why aren’t CDS traders tweaking curves by clicking and dragging points and then hitting a button to get new risk during the day? Why aren’t there more ActionScript jobs on Wall Street paying upwards of $150k like there are for good programmers with a handle on Bloomberg APIs?
When I read the "What Went Wrong at Amaranth?" article today, it made me wonder whether you have to be a convertible-bond trader making natural gas bets to get in trouble with paper gains, leveraged investments, and liquidity. The WSJ wrote,
Amaranth's systems didn't appear to measure correctly how much risk it faced and what steps would limit losses effectively… They also might not predict how much selling of one's stakes to get out of a position can cause prices to fall.
Couldn’t this problem face any hedge fund putting increasing amounts of capital into play with traditional equity strategies? If you have a $20 million in a micro-cap position, does your risk report take liquidity into account for VAR calculations? Perhaps more concerning is the implied liquidity concerns for lenders who don’t have transparency into the full book or depth of positions with funds that keep positions with multiple prime brokers.
Out of curiosity, I wanted to look at VAR with very basic, user-adjusted measures to approximate VAR in a large equity position with leverage.
We've released an update to Proto Viewer and Proto Financial that's available now. The simplest way to update your software is to open Proto and let the automatic updater do it's thing. This is primarily a bug-fix release, but there are a few small new features. The highlights are:
