In 1992, I wrote a paper on the future of application development for Lloyds Bank. My paper described a vision of “end user development” to maximise flexibility and reduce cost of development. In this paper I called for the bank to:
- Develop more tools and less applications.
- Data access to be separated from applications.
- Create applications from services (that returned data or screens).
The first point argued that first we should write “tools” not solutions. For example, we had a standard letters application for generating customer communication; however, this solution was written for specific letter types and didn’t have the concept of templates meaning that new code was written for additional letters.
