Big companies starting to believe in model-driven development?

Last week, the École des Mines de Nantes organized the seminar “Future Challenges of Information Systems in Bank and Insurance companies”.

Three topics were constantly raised by the participants (basically, heads of IS departments of Bank and Insurance companies): cloud computing, development of multi-channel applications and model-driven development.

It looks like, after many years, big companies (by “big” I mean companies that have at least around ten thousand employees) start to believe that MDD (maybe not yet MDE in general, see the difference ) can help in the development and maintenance of their software systems. Until now, MDE adoption was mainly done in smaller companies which are always more eager to try new technologies (they are more likely to be the early adopters in the technology adoption cycle ) in search for a competitive advantage.

In particular, Thierry Daviet from MACIF (France’s leading car insurer) mentioned that he believes that MDD is the way to 1 – manage the complexity of IS, 2- improve productivity and lower the development costs and 3 – reduce the need of having experts in all the new technologies that keep blooming every day. He also mentioned that they are now doing the firsts internal experiments to see if these “beliefs” around the benefits of modeling turn out to be true. Definitely a step in the right direction.