The Business Programmer Gap

I had lunch today with a good colleague who's a Rules Guy... Shocking, I know, to think of a Process Guy having lunch with a Rules Guy... but it's good to socialize with these folks in the hope that they'll wise up and "see the light" ;-)

Process Guys and Rules Guys have a common problem.  Our products can change the world... Improving efficiency, cutting through bottle-necks, eliminating fraud and waste... but only if governments make widespread use of them.  Governments kind of like the idea of using our tools, but they can't use our tools unless they can find a lot of people who know how to use our tools.  A lot of people.

Every Federal, State, County and City government needs our tools.  Big, huge or tiny... it doesn't matter the scale... governments need our tools to manage their procedures and policies - and they need people who know how to use our tools.

My colleague and I live in Santa Fe, New Mexico... not the smallest state capital, but by far not the largest.  Not the worst state government, but not the most stellar either.  I'm convinced that widespread use of Business Process Management and Business Rules systems within our state government could help dramatically improve our state's operations... but there simply aren't enough BPM and BRM folks in the state to tackle the problems.  Case in point, there's been an unfilled BPM consultant posting on the Santa Fe Craigslist for months.

I travel the world helping people master our BPM suite.  I would never say that there's "no coding required"... that's simply not true... but the level of programming skill that's required is way below that needed for truly custom programming.  You need to know some JavaScript and some SQL, and it really helps if you know a bit of HTML and how to parse XML, but you don't need much more than that.  Our BPM suite handles most of the heavy lifting on "the front end" of your processes (Truth in advertising caveat: Your traditional IT folks still need to do your back-end integrations).

Folks who have the right aptitude can pick up the skills that they need in a very short time.  Months, not years... less if they have the right guidance.  I know because I've helped them.

The problem is one of classic "Chicken and Egg".  I'd love to teach a class at our local community college (the Santa Fe Community College is awesome), but nobody in their right mind would sign up for the course.  There's no work for the graduate of a BPM program here in town.

We could solve that problem by convincing the State to launch some BPM projects... but they'd be insane to do so... There aren't any BPM folks available to staff those projects.

This "Chicken and Egg" conundrum isn't unique to Santa Fe.  Off the top of my head I can only think of a dozen cities in the country where you wouldn't have a problem staffing a BPM or BRM project.  Business programmers are a rare breed outside the urban centers... as I imagine database programmers were a generation ago.

We can fix that. We can close "the Business Programmer Gap"... but only if the "Chicken" or the "Egg" goes first.