REVELATION SOFTWARE
4GL - the cost-effective alternative

I’ve always felt that 4GLs can supply, in practice, a good proportion of what more "politically correct" IT initiatives only promise in theory. Unsurprisingly, Andrew McAuley, chairman of Revelation Software Limited appears to agree with me:

Consider any commodity that can be manufactured, Andrew says. In the early days, goods are handcrafted by specialists who charge handsomely for their time. Good furniture used to be the preserve of the rich who could buy custom built units that would last forever (with reference to that lovely quote from Alan Clarke about Heseltine, "the kind of person who bought his own furniture"). Craftsmen were well rewarded for their services and could advance socially because of it. As more people owned property and had disposable income, more people could buy furniture but there weren't enough craftsmen to go around. In any case, it was still too expensive. As there were so many people wanting to buy, entrepreneurs could invest in mechanised ways of creating furniture and mass production was born. The same is true of cars as an example. Henry Ford standardised, therefore ‘you could have any colour you wanted as long as it was black.’

If you were to plot a curve of skill levels versus cost per hour, you would predictably get a standard curve. The very skilled people charge a great deal per hour and there are very few of them. The partially skilled people are relatively inexpensive and exist in the industry in greater quantities. The unskilled have no place in the industry.

It therefore follows that if the delivery of software is componentised, so that the actual skill levels required to deliver a component are relatively low but specialised, both a greater churn and variety of components can be achieved. Take as an example a factory line worker assembling a specific part of a car. The task itself may be complex but it can be learned and once learned repeated ad infinitum.

If there is sufficient demand for standardised custom software, (not the oxymoron it appears), then it is possible to set up assembly lines of business analysts, DBAs, C++ programmers, VB programmers, ISA experts, IIS experts, and so forth. Each level is specialist but it can be mastered to MCP level in a matter of weeks – the same cannot be said of truly skilled jobs.

Once at this level, tools vendors are able to move vast quantities of software. It is actually in their interests to keep this componentisation as unitised as possible to achieve the highest sales volumes. But having arrived at the point where the skills needed to assemble software may be acquired routinely, there is bound to be an outflux of work to where such skills are even cheaper.

Of course, the corollary is that the only people who can afford to develop software using this model are the people who can afford the production line, thus effectively alienating the SME who then becomes dependant on these software factories and must reduce their expectations accordingly.

However, how can anyone in their right mind believe that a team of five to ten people can deliver a custom solution more economically than a team of one? Nevertheless, that is the myth that organisations such as Microsoft have successfully marketed, and why? Because that means they can sell five to ten pieces of software instead of just one.

So, the reason for the resurgence of interest in 4GLs is because they provide the only way SMEs can fight back and the only way skilled programmers can see of their jobs staying in this country. Also, the answer to "how can a small software house deliver more products faster" lies in another 1980's maxim: "Don't automate – obliterate". The idea is to solve problems by not having them. In particular, when you have a lot of layers in a process, then the cost of handing off between layers exceeds the benefit of the layers. In business this led to the "caseworker" model, where computers brought knowledge to decision makers. In computing, this has not happened. 4GL in competent hands could make it so. Microsoft’s alternative model of the software factory embeds a very high process cost that can be reduced by using cheap labour, but cannot be removed.