Jon Pyke of Cordys has the boundless enthusiasm of a man in his twenties combined with over 30 years of experience at the sharp end of Business Process Management and software development. A rare blend and one I am sure is fueled by his appetite for double expresso, “extra strong please, don’t tell the wife, I am not allowed this stuff with caffeine at home”, he quips.

Jon is a veteran and a globally recognized Business Process Management (BPM) pioneer and luminary. He was formerly Chief Technology Officer for Staffware, acquired by Tibco, and is a co-founder and chairman of the Workflow Management Coalition (WfMC), a global organization devoted to the advancement of workflow and BPM standards and awareness.

Jon came to see me to talk about Cordys BPMS and how we might leverage the functionality to abstract the back-end systems that we are changing and consolidating. The objective is to maintain the same front end whilst we transition to prevent confusion for our call centers and customers.

What really brought it home about how good this stuff really is was the casual way that Jon demonstrated the drag and drop interface, a right click and the “there you have your scalable Web Services platform” throwaway line. Quite literally we had our basic business process mapped and automated in a few minutes.

OK so we have a bit more work to do to tie up the detail over the next few weeks and months, but I never remember software development being this simple before, quite, quite stunning.