Design for People, Build for Change

Since I did not attend the event, read the coverage (The Intelligent Enterprise Blog) of the opening keynote, entitled "Design for People, Build for Change: Transforming the Nature of Work," offered by analyst Connie Moore at this week's Forrester Technology Leadership Forum.
It seems that there were some very interesting Enterprise/CRM/Web 2.0 themes that emerged from this keynote.

"The new generation of workers, dubbed "millenials" by Moore, have grown up with
completely different experiences and therefore have completely different
expectations about what systems will look like as they enter the workforce,
particularly around social networking. Added to all this is the evolution of
process management as a discipline, and the dissolution of monolithic business
applications into composite applications that use BPM, SOA, business rules,
collaboration and other technologies, either on-premise or as SaaS."

Very much inline with what I believe enterprise applications are evolving into. We've been talking about composite applications for years now, but I think that maturing Web 2.0 technologies and the ability to enable (design and automate) a cross enterprise process oriented approach will be the focus in enterprises.

"She lays out four key principles for designing for people, and gave a detailed
example of each (including a really interesting Second Life example for the 4th
point):
1. Business processes adapt to changing business conditions. 2.
Applications evolve continuously while preserving process integrity. 3.
Processes, tasks and the associated information always maintain context. 4.
Systems are unitary, information-rich and reflect the social needs of the
business.
The first two of these are about build for change, and the last two
are about design for people."

The first two principles lead me to the loosely coupled but effective integration of business processes and applications. The next two principles to me among other things speak about the evolution and adoption of more intelligent BPM tools and the adoption of Web 2.0 in the enterprise.