Category: EbizQ

Sometimes people can look at something and come to completely different conclusions. Take my ten-year-old son. To him, if he has to do something (or if he’s required to do something) it’s not worth doing. He can always think of something else that’s more interesting or more worthwhile. However (perhaps just because I’m a parent) I believe the opposite. That just because you have to do something doesn’t mean that it’s not worth doing. In many cases, the things that we’re required to do can end up being very beneficial for us. It’s just that it’s not always obvious how they’re beneficial.

As a youngster, I never liked change. I didn’t like birthday parties. And I didn’t like having to get new clothes each September before school started. I liked the clothes I had. My mother, however, thought differently. I got new clothes whether I wanted them or not. I got a haircut whether I wanted it or not.
Today’s businesses face the same types of dictates. Well, okay, my mother isn’t making everyone get haircuts. Or new outfits. But the market is dictating that businesses be able to respond in a much more integrated fashion. Not only integrated, but a much faster fashion as well. Today’s organizations need to be much more efficient in using information effectively, managing information efficiently, and turning that information into insight so that business decision makers can make the right decisions.

Over the past few weeks I’ve been talking a number of large enterprises about technology adoption trends, SOA and business process management. I thought it would be interesting to pull out an example of a company rolling out service oriented architecture to learn from their experiences and perspective.
The company under analysis is a large, multi-billion dollar technology company located in the United States. Like many technology companies, they have two important characteristics: 1) they’ve grown rapidly, and 2) they have a wide range of heterogeneous applications, including ERP, CRM and other packaged applications from a variety of vendors.

Sometimes things are complicated and there’s no easy or standard way to simplify them.
That’s where complex event processing comes in. Complex event processing software helps organizations deal with processing huge volumes of transaction and real-time data-not so much from the transaction perspective, but from the analysis and understanding perspective.

It’s not easy being digital. Even from a personal perspective, the range of digital devices I’ve accumulated and use over the past few years has grown exponentially. From digital cameras to (multiple) wireless phones to PDAs to (again, multiple) laptops to on-line services such as gmail, I have my fingerprints all over the digital world.
While the results have been great – I’m able to manage, communicate and produce more effectively than I ever have before – I spend a much larger portion of my time managing and integrating data, even at this personal level. Instead of an old-fashioned and single address book, I have multiple digital address books. I have email directories duplicated (and perhaps out-of-synch) across multiple systems. Try as I might, it’s simply not simple to keep information integrated and in synch.
Unfortunately, over that same period of time, most organizations have been experiencing the same type of problems, but on a much larger scale.

Product data is more important now than ever before. Of course it’s always been important. It’s been the basis of all types of sales, inventory and manufacturing systems since the beginning of IT. But now, with the advent of SOA and a wide range of ever-broader business requirements, having the right product data in the right form at the right time is more important than ever before. In addition, it can’t be just any product data – it has to be consistent, reliable and accurate. For most organizations, that’s no easy task.
Let’s take a closer look at the issue of product data reliability and business needs.

Supply chains are nothing new. In fact, over the past ten years, most organizations have spent an awful lot of time making sure their supply chains are efficient. In many cases, this meant not only automating the supply chain and building tighter electronic relationships with business partners and suppliers, but it also meant looking at supply chain processes and identifying areas where time, costs, or waste could be reduced.
But, as I’ve noted in my previous columns, there’s a real need for organizations to also think about their information supply chain and their underlying data, particularly when they start to implement SOA.

Over the past few years, many organizations have invested heavily in service oriented architecture (SOA) as an approach for creating a more agile, responsive and re-usable IT infrastructure that can respond effectively and efficiently to business requirements.
But as organizations continue to focus on SOA and building services that can be re-used and shared across different business processes, there’s one issue that’s often overlooked; the reliability of the underlying data.

Business process management (BPM) is a great approach for automating, managing and optimizing a wide range of business processes. But that’s the problem.
Many BPM solutions can be used to manage and optimize a wide range of processes. On the surface (and for many companies) that’s a good thing-organizations can invest in one (BPM) platform to handle both horizontally- and vertically-oriented processes. Over the past five years, most BPM products have broadened to point where they’re platforms more than products-supersized BPM, if you will-which is a very good thing.

“Plays well with others,” and perhaps sometimes, “Doesn’t play well with others,” were comments that I remember from report cards growing up, with the more negative evaluation coming the same year I spent dealing (not terribly effectively) with a boy named Thomas who spent the majority of the year following me around and imitating everything that I did. After a while, that kind of behavior can get on your nerves.
However, these types of evaluations can also be applied to enterprise BPM projects (as well as many other types of projects). The more effectively the business, IT and project participants can “play well with others,” the more likely the BPM solution will be effective and productive.