Still tough
TechWeb has a longish article on the increasing orientation of development tools towards business process orientation (BPO). Val and I were having a conversation along these lines the other day - it's a good thing that the tools are getting better and that you don't have to spend so much effort on the plumbing. However, there is still a pretty big divide between the understanding of a business process and enabling that process in code (whether old-school C++ or one of the new business process modeling tools like BizTalk). That is still tough and where the big bucks are made - modeling the processes in a comprehensive and realistic way.