Agile development path leads to SaaS

Ten years ago most IT shops were not ready for agile consulting methods. Today, they better be.

At the turn of the century, CIOs were deploying heavy client-server applications, explains Eric Berridge, principal and co-founder of Bluewolf LLC in New York. As such, they depended on old-school consulting firms and their time-consuming, expensive engagements.

"The downside of getting a [deployment] wrong was too high to risk an agile approach," he says, adding that back then it was important to get every possible detail nailed down up front and follow a old-school waterfall development approach. "You had to dot every I and cross every T because if you got the spec wrong, the consequences were significant."

"But the waterfall approach today fails miserably," Berridge concludes.

Bluewolf is an agile development consulting firm that targets IT shops wanting to leverage Web 2.0 technologies quickly. Berridge claims traditional consulting approaches "are bloated and ineffective and seldom aligned to customer business objectives."

From Bluewolf's perspective, hiring an old-line consultancy for, say, a project to employ SaaS as part of a streamlining of business processes, is like going to a buggy whip supplier to improve the performance of your car.

But the real value of companies like Bluewolf is not so much integration work or even customization of your SaaS tool.

"That's a commodity you can get offshore," Berridge observes.

Rather, he contends, you want a consultant who gets the importance of defining, implementing and connecting business processes for the Web world of today and tomorrow.

Although not every Bluewolf assignment leads to SaaS, most do, says Berridge, because the long term value is clear to both his company and its customers. After all, it's the streamlined future, not the bloated past.