Like the week in December leading up to the Gregorian New Year (or do I have the wrong pope; is it Julian?), the week of July 4th is a slow news week. Although it is just an American holiday, IT companies believe that because the U.S. accounts for about 40% of all IT spending, it makes no sense to churn the worldwide waters with information while half the market is at the beach.
So this week provides me an opportunity for trolling the web with a google on "BPM" (I am always at the beach here on Cape Cod). I found an interesting blog and business process management (BPM)-related blog postings by a Microsoft "Enterprise Architect," Avinash Nicklas Chan Kumar Malik. His bio is here. The particular post that caught my eye is here (but there are a lot of other interesting BPM postings in his archives).
A Microsoft Enterprise Architect is a high-level professional developer and the point of his article, I think, is that BPM is not going to put programmers out of business. Despite the analysis of many, including me, that the goal of enterprises is to have BPM software working so well that non-IT folks can string together their own processes without getting the IT department involved, we aren't there yet. Avinash doesn't think we ever will be.
He may be right in terms of his criticism of BPM notation languages such as BPEL and BPMN (in fact, I never heard anyone promise that they would be used by non-IT). But if so, another trend (what you newbies call SaaS, or appliances, or some confluence of IT and the utility industry) will eventually reduce the role of the software developer as we know it. The demise of the IT developer in the enterprise is a matter of philosophy, economics and demographics. In reverse order, there are fewer and fewer well trained developers, they cost too much and we have to stop re-inventing the wheel.
By the way, Avinash, that is not to say that the need for developers won't grow and grow at Microsoft (and Oracle, SAP, IBM, Verizon, Google, ConEd, Disney/ABC, and so forth).
There are three important words in the following sentence: "... will eventually reduce the role of the software developer AS WE KNOW IT". Yes, we won't see many developers coding and coding again what has been coded and many other projects. However, we will need Software Architects, Modelers and Experts which are able to specify problems and solutions in an exact way (not necessarily in a formalized way, since good tools may assist) in order to utilize and configure pre-packaged Software, Saas etc. so that it is actually doing what the business requires. And those experts are not today's Business Analysts who leave the details to the IT folks.