whither software development

Read in another blog that the era of business application programming is fading. I should have gotten the book out five years ago! But it’s usually the standard reason for the decline: companies are switching to standardized off-the-shelf implementations. A few years ago it was big enterprise packages, now it’s the cloud. So while I do agree that business application programming is probably in decline (but does anybody collect hard statistics?) a bit of skepticism, the reports seem often driven by marketing hopes and wishes. What we need is a development regime to address the needs of small outfits that need some aspect of their business automated but who can’t afford the costs, can’t afford to eat the costs of failed/lame projects (risk!) or pay the ongoing maintenance of our current way of programming. Part of the issue is not just the programming, I have the sneaking suspicion more and more programming is DIY and under the radar, but I worry that the larger issues are not ignored, they aren’t even visible by the unwary. Security, privacy, liability, legal, regulatory, audit, recovery, backup and restore, and so on. Something that a project manager (ought) to know about. It’s not about does this programming language handle this kind of bit nibbling or not. But admittedly, I haven’t been looking around. Are there freelance project managers out there helping small business?