BPM-EAI

There is one objective for IT operations - reduce the existing operations cost and ensure a good sense of predictability on discretionary spending towards growth and scalability. All the initiatives whether it be SAAS, Public Cloud, Private Cloud, Virtualization are all aimed towards the same basic objectives. But enterprises still clamor for the right fit, fail in many of the initiatives and reducing the cost becomes a challenge. The IT vehicle hits the brakes on the road towards its supposed destination
It seems as if Cloud solutions could provide the mix of reducing the cost as well as provide tools and accelerators for new development. Sometimes it becomes a risk when the information transacted is part of the cloud and not “in” the Enterprise Infrastructure.
Some questions posed to the IT leaders are whether and when to go for cloud? Next is what all should go in the cloud? Should one have multiple clouds or single cloud? Should you have a mix of Private and Public clouds? and so on…
The theme of this write up is whether the “Enterprise Integration Services” could serve as the tipping point for the cloud and pave the way for exponential growth in usage of Cloud across the enterprise technologies.

Continue reading "Tipping Point for Enterprises towards Cloud..." »

Posted by Narayanan Chathanur at 8:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

In our last part, we were discussing the Social BPM Adoption Model, and we saw how collaborative process design is an integral part of the model. The next evolutionary step is to extend collaboration from process design to process execution through runtime participation. In this stage, though the process participants are fixed as in any conventional BPM solution, they are enabled with social tools that help them in better collaboration. These social tools are integrated into the BPMS landscape and can provide features like chat, VOIP enabled calls, commenting on tasks, providing ratings, voting mechanisms etc.

Continue reading "Evolutionary Social BPM Adoption Model and incorporating social features in existing BPM Solutions - Part 2" »

Posted by Shankar Krishnamurthy at 10:12 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I was making a presentation to a CIO of a large bank headquartered in Netherlands on the need to have an evolving strategy around BPM as several enterprise spaces are morphing into one another and the space is constantly shape shifting. It was during that time that I realized the strong connect and the peer pressure that exists among the CXO community in Netherlands. The CIO of the bank was intently looking at "extending" their existing BPM solutions by incorporate social features because he came to know from one of the CIO of a competing bank that they had just then kick-started a similar program. I was happy because all we were hearing till then on Social BPM were from the analysts without significant corroboration from our clients on the ground. This set me thinking. I believe we are currently witnessing trigger events for an extensive social play in the BPM space. I wanted to share my perspective on the need for an evolving Social BPM adoption model and how various components of traditional BPM solution can be extended to incorporate social interaction features.

Continue reading "Evolutionary Social BPM Adoption Model and incorporating social features in existing BPM Solutions - Part 1" »

Posted by Shankar Krishnamurthy at 12:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

A branch manager is interested in seeing whether there has been abnormally low or high transactions in a particular day. A Banking regional manager is interested in knowing whether there has been an increase in customers with a recently launched campaign. The country head is more interested in knowing which areas have performed better or worse as compared to a predefined expectation. The global CFO is interested in seeing that if there is a revenue at risk due to any kind of external or internal impact. The HR head is interested in seeing the percentage change in attrition due to an initiative to increase the employee hours in the branches for providing better customer service. The CIO needs to look at the benefits of the discretionary spending over the last year. An IT manager overseeing a multi-million development program wants to estimate the value and even compare the actuals once it is delivered and is ready for measurement.

Most of the information in such examples conventionally have been available as offline reports run through batch jobs scheduled as per the need and convenience or through different other means.

The question is how should an enterprise design its Information Architecture to deliver the right set of KPIs and also make it more usable at all levels. Here are some tips:

Continue reading "An Architecture for KPI - Most needed but ignored" »

Posted by Narayanan Chathanur at 11:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

In the place where I live on this planet, monsoons come twice. However, in the virtual world of IT services, it has been raining all through the year, due to the “clouds”. The concept of “cloud” based provisioning is not new to mankind. During the Agricultural civilizations - clouds from vapors of water ensured that consumption needs of the humans are met. During digital civilization - “clouds” are provisioning digital consumption needs of people today.

The foundation for contemporary cloud based computing takes us back to early 20th century where the world was witnessing the “first war of the cloud” between Tesla and Edison- for the best model of transmitting “electric power” in a “cloud” model [Grid-based-AC vs. Short-distance-DC]. At the same time, in Cambridge UK, Alan Turing, proposed a model of computing, later called ‘Turing Machine’ which has infinite memory [tape], infinite computation capability. Grid based supply of electric current has always been compared with the Cloud-based computing facility.

Continue reading "Clouds in my coffee!" »

Posted by Anil Prasad Kurnool at 11:22 AM | Permalink | Comments (6) | TrackBacks (0)

By Paresh Deshpande

Over the past couple of years, I had opportunity to work as integration adviser for global IT projects of an enterprise. Watching closely execution of such integration projects was a great learning experience. I couldn't resist sharing my experience from one such project I worked on recently.

Continue reading "Global Integration Projects: Challenges and Opportunities" »

Posted by Paresh Deshpande at 8:48 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

“Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn’t.” said Mark Twain. In our day to day lives, we come across many truths which we blissfully ignore and take it as a matter of fact. Gravity is one such “truth”, while many a pseudo truths have been falsified as stated by Nicolas Taleb in “Black Swan”; Sir Karl Pooper went on to say about scientific truth are of two types, first type - which is falsified and the other type - waiting to be falsified.

Notwithstanding the debate about the truth and absolute truth, there are certain aspects which remain true even after many centuries or many ages that have passed by. “Gravity” and “Division by Zero” are two prominent examples that come to our minds when we think of Universal Truth. The most modern technologies, when applied cannot falsify these truths. May be a human/animal can feel a sense of Zero-Gravity for a moment or a few, but again they are subjected to the ever present reality.

Continue reading "ICC: Standing the test of time" »

Posted by Anil Prasad Kurnool at 9:46 AM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

In one of the past engagements, an SOA solution involving around 80 services being defined did not have any documented NFRs. When we requested to the business team, the response was quite timely - that all services need to respond within one second, all should be highly available, all should be available in multiple data centers and should be part of disaster recovery.
There is nothing incorrect in having such a requirement but it is neither realistic nor beneficial.

In another case, a programme going live in another few weeks was doing its load testing as the last phase of testing but most of the test cases were failing and not meeting the NFRs putting a risk to the programme.

Questions that naturally arise - How should one manage the NFRs in an enterprise without getting into ‘obvious’ troubles? How can we use the NFRs to predict the performance even before the solution is in build or even design phase?, What-if, after doing this exercise and the resultant prediction itself is leading to unexpected values?, Can we chart out a plan to get to the end goal with right justification to the cost?

These are exactly the questions that need to be answered through Performance Engineering.

Continue reading "Managing NFRs and Predicting Performance" »

Posted by Narayanan Chathanur at 11:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Continue reading "Why Private Clouds are not the most ideal choice ..." »

Posted by Maloy Patnaik at 2:11 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

While I talked about the theme elements and the key focus areas, Infosys participation at TUCON 2011 provided us with interesting insights to customer perspectives. More and more customers are finally looking at the Cloud seriously, something substantiated by TIBCO themselves.

Continue reading "LIVE Update from TUCON 2011 - Part : 2" »

Posted by Kapil Nanchahal at 2:55 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)