Resolution Technology Ltd. Object-oriented software has met its promise of reduced development costs, applications better meeting the needs of industry and lower maintenance costs for delivered systems. From the end-user customer's perception, however, little has changed over the last decade. Having invested a lot of time, money, and effort to create and install such systems, business are loathe to change anything until the investment can be written off. Static information systems often lead to a similar stasis in a business's mode of operation, potentially allowing more adventurous competitors to win away business. Despite this initially gloomy outlook, the increasing maturity of object-oriented techniques now puts us in a position where the early promises of the approach can be delivered.
Many software components are now available, embodying years of testing and incremental improvement.
Object-oriented analysis and design has caught up with the programming, enabling business requirements to be captured more easily than before and with greater accuracy. Interoperability standards open the way for the exchange of information between systems. The identification of concepts common across business enterprises and between industry sectors allows models to be created describing specific problem domains. The most flexible, and in the mid-term most profitable approach, is to identify a Common Business Model, representing those aspects of a business enterprise that are common between enterprises irrespective of the given enterprises' industry sector. For example, the general notion of a transaction is common to industries as diverse as banking, retail, manufacturing, and broadcasting.