One of the items from the keynote yesterday was the introduction to what Pega is referring to as Stage-Based Case Management. As part of the rewrite for Pega 7 it ushers in a new era of DCO (Direct Capture of Objectives), that piece of PRPC that’s aimed squarely at the business users.
Apart from the massive UI changes which look a hell of a lot better than v6 (ie it’s like moving from iPhone iOS6 to iOS7), SBCM captures the ‘business vision’ for the process and works down from there. Whereas before in previous versions of Pega 6 you would capture goals, requirements, process, integration points etc in the Application Profile (something which looked akin to IBM’s Blueworks) and then ran the accelerator to build out the basics of an application and work from thereon in, SBCM actually takes it back into the business technology side again. If you think about various powerpoint slides you’ve seen in your careers of Level 1 and Level 2 processes and the artefacts that sit within each this is essentially what Pega has done with Stage-Based Case Management and DCO. There’s no break in the chain between defining the business objectives, running a tool to generate a skeleton application and then leaving it in the hands of the development teams.
One of the things I picked up in the Press Q&A session with Alan Trefler was that he saw the theoretical role of the Business Analyst fading away, there’s no more need for a middleman to translate requirements for IT using Pega 7. Bold statement and we’ll have to see whether his claim holds up when v7 is released.
Whether or not they’ll have to revamp some of the DCO and CMBB certified training to fit around the new SBCM is a watching brief, but I was told today that you can’t migrate what’s been plugged away in DCO from v6 into v7 because it’s a completely new beast.
I’ll try to get a slidedeck with more info and screenshots soon.
