The disconnect between IT and the rest of the business can usually be traced back to the fact that while developers know a lot about code, they don’t usually have a deep understanding of how the business works. To bridge that divide, organizations have been looking to empower business people to develop their own applications as part of a phenomenon generally referred to as the rise of the citizen developer.
The problem is that low-code tools still require someone who has a basic grasp of how software is supposed to function. Red Hat today took the concept of empowering business executives a step further with the release of Red Hat Decision Manager 7, a decision management platform that makes it simple to create rules-based applications and services.
Red Hat Decision Manager 7 traces its lineage back to the JBoss portfolio of middleware that Red Hat acquired way back in 2006. But now, the company is renaming this tool as part of an effort to make business people aware that a tool that enables them to create applications or even a relatively small microservice exists.
Phil Simpson, product marketing manager for JBoss at Red Hat, says Red Hat Decision Manager 7 is a type of low-code development tool optimized for Red Hat middleware. But unlike other offerings, Red Hat Decision Manager 7 enables business users or citizen developers to directly modify business logic without any intervention on the part of a professional developer required. New capabilities include support for the direct execution of models expressed in Decision Model and Notation (DMN), redesigned decision tables and a decision table editor, and an improved data modeler.
“We build Red Hat Decision Manager to enable business users on their own to plug a gap,” says Simpson.
The real issue businesses face today is that there simply are not enough professional developers available to address an application backlog that continues to grow. If every company is now a software company, then the rate at which applications are built and updated is critical to their success. If the success of a digital business is entirely dependent on having access to professional developers, it’s almost guaranteed to fail.
Of course, it never hurts to have business users that understand the fundamentals of how code works. But it’s also clear to almost everyone involved in a business that waiting for a limited number of available developers to eventually get around to their problem isn’t going to do much for advancing their careers.