Infosys’ BPM-EAI blog offers a platform to discuss the latest trends in the Business Process Management and Enterprise Application Integration spaces. Exchange thoughts, ideas and opinions with Infosys experts on how BPM and EAI programs can be leveraged to achieve operational excellence and maximize your return on investment.

May 7, 2013

Social Event Processing - Avenues for Big Data and CEP

By now we all know that if we have to catch the latest happenings around the world then social networks are the place to be in. Be it the latest news, product launch, reviews or just a plain musings of a friend...So there is so much happening every moment and sure enough there is huge amount of pure data and a lot of noise as well out there - and everybody wants to jump on it. But is there any information that can be drawn out of this raw data?

The answer is a big YES, in fact you will be surprised to know that your plain innocent expression on social networks is driving new product designs, business models and strategies, changing conventional business processes giving rise to a whole new world of opportunities. Companies are effectively applying big data and CEP technologies onto social data in order to connect with the customers more closely than ever before. So how is this happening...?  I want to try and explain this using few scenarios that I have run into...

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April 17, 2013

IT Outsourcing akin Alien Abduction

It is all familiar story of a Brazilian farmer; Antonio Boas was abducted by Aliens in late 1950s. Till his death in early 1990s he stood by his claim. For a moment, let us think like those Aliens who investigated a human. They in their report, which they might submit to their “tour” sponsor agency, would describe a human being as a dozen+ groups of systems consisting of approximately forty+ major organs, some fibers and tissues. Let us say, that Aliens get more enthusiastic and pick up a dead person instead and perform an autopsy and the report would be more or less similar.

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April 1, 2013

Numbers don't lie

Why most enterprises still can’t measure the macro and micro economic indicators of the services they provide as well as what they consume?
Getting down to the services, Most SOA practitioners recommend that without the ‘manage’ or ‘governance’ any SOA implementation is neither complete nor fully beneficial. Most BPM practitioners recommend that without the support of metrics and application of BAM, the value realization of BPM is not complete.
But still majority of the IT implementations ignore or postpone indefinitely the concept of ‘measure’ though the adage “If one can’t measure, one can’t manage” is not alien to most enterprise managers.
Few things to make any SOA implementation robust assuming other basic tenets of design, development are still done using best recommended practices:

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March 13, 2013

CEP for unburdening Big Data Complexities

InfosysLabs has released the latest publication themed on Big Data - Big data: Challenges and opportunities.

One of the papers some of my colleagues also put together was on how CEP can be leveraged for Big Data. A direct link for this paper is available at CEP: Unburdening Big Data

We hope this helps in simplifying and provides better understanding of the Big Data challenges and how different concepts, technologies can be leveraged in dealing with Big Data.

March 8, 2013

CMOs - What Next?

Four years from now, CMOs will spend more on IT than CIOs do. So what's your next best action in Marketing?

What if you have a system that can contextually identify customer needs, send relevant offers timely and consistently - all this personalizing to an individual customer level? No wonder you can trust that such a system can boost your offer conversion rates 4X.

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February 4, 2013

Sustainability with BPM and SOA

Across the length, breadth and depth of organizations be it from largest of oil and energy companies to smallest of street side stores and from developed countries to underdeveloped; most have adopted the green prefix (green IT, green energy, green computing, etc.) or simply sustainability in their work philosophies.

Infosys has been one of the early proponents of Sustainability and has consistently won awards and appreciations. In particular to emphasize this, Sustainable Tomorrow is one of the key pillars for Building Tomorrow’s Enterprise.

This article attempts to advise on how technology approaches like BPM and SOA can interpolate this larger theme in its fold…

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January 12, 2013

Containerization : The Secret Sauce for Enterprise BPM Mobility

Over the last few year, while most organisations have decided that adopting mobility is imminent in almost all aspects of their business, there are still some fundamental challenges that need to be met. Not surprisingly, the most important one of these challenges relates to security of the information stored on the mobile devices. While the security challenge is manageable for external facing mobile applications, since there are conventional security solutions available, the challenges are much more when it comes to extending core enterprise applications unto a mobile platform. 
Until recently, mobile access to core enterprise systems have been limited to read only access to reports and dashboards since the risks associated with static data snapshots are relatively less compared to "live access". This has worked well in the age of ERP based enterprise IT landscapes where the information was, in any case, locked up in core systems and made available through data-warehouses only.

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December 14, 2012

BPM Consultant & Business Analyst -The 2 Faces of a Process Expert

In the years since Business Process Management (BPM) and Business Rules Management Systems (BRMS) have made their presence felt in the enterprise, IT personnel have had to quickly adapt to the new set of technologies, platforms and skills required in order to react to their customer demands. While these developments have fundamentally impacted the enterprise world, another group of stakeholders - the Business Analysts - suddenly see a new focus on the process work that they have been doing all along. It is quite evident that the BPM Consultants share a common thing with the Business Analysts and Functional Consultants... the all-important BUSINESS PROCESS!

A few vital questions arise - do Business Analysts and Functional Consultants need to have anything to do with BPM technologies? Do BPM Consultants need to understand the underlying business process in all its glorious detail or should they be quite content in implementing technology solutions as they see fit?

This article aims to clarify various facets of a BPM Consultant and the close relationship, if not overlap, with the role of a Business Analyst. It also puts forth some views on why these roles are morphing into a single entity in tomorrow's enterprise and indeed, why is it really necessary for this to be so.

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November 14, 2012

Millions of dollars left on the table

A fully integrated process management connecting all the key people in service delivery 24X7 is inevitable today. A winning service delivery process can position information and services in the easiest possible way to the customers, reach employees and customers on their mobiles, exploit social media capabilities to influence buying behaviour, synthesize and exploit abundantly available market information at the right stage of delivery on right time.

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October 28, 2012

Of The Algorithms and The Atman

Algorithm is defined as a step-by-step procedure for solving a problem or accomplishing some end especially by a computer. [Merriam-Webster Dictionary]

If one knows how to come out with a best possible algorithm, the manifestation of the algorithm with the use of a programming language would ensure the end is accomplished by computer. One need not be a master in all the programming languages that are available in the market, but can come up with a decently good program in any programming language - as the semantics would remain the same, while the syntax might change.

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