BPM-EAI

Finally organizations are coming to the terms of reality of multiple-integration platforms in their landscape. There was a time in not so distant past when clients were thinking to have a single middleware, struggling to migrate all the legacy of their enterprise on the so called ‘middleware of strategic choice’ (whatever it would have been for them at that point in time) and spending great deal of time and money in this process. Some managed to do, others got stuck in the time warp of technology evolution. And equally for those who managed to do it as well as who got stuck, time did the trick and soon the definition of the ‘middleware of strategic choice’ changed. It meant, those in the good feeling of ‘done with it’ have to again break their head to move the new legacy to the future platform. Those who were stuck it changed the to-be picture from one middleware to other and they were still stuck in their mess. Now what is happening is slightly more realistic and practical I guess. There are two key trends I can see:

1. Clients are aligning their middleware to the package economy system (SAP, Oracle, Microsoft etc.) with a view that they will have more than one middleware bus that can serve respective economies depending on the alignment
   
2. Clients are evaluating hard for their choices between pure-play integration options like TIBCO, IBM, Biztalk vs. package-centric middleware like SAP XI/PI, Oracle Fusion middleware etc. Some clients are of the opinion that in long run, package-centric middleware will pay off better for them while others are keeping the composite middleware infrastructure including both pure-play middleware as well as package-centric middleware.

Those are signs of changes in my mind. Given that SOA hype is coming down and BPM is taking over (aligned to SOA though), both architecturally as well as product selection-wise, organizations have started thinking different about integration. They are open to break down the barriers of traditional definitions and exploit the technological capability to create newer options. I think it’s high time for such a change. Time has come when clients are taking the control back from vendors and have started driving how they want the technology capability to behave and serve their needs. Same drive is now emerging as a focus for establishing ‘platforms’ for service integration and not just basic technology infrastructure. Platform as a concept has been around for decades. But this is now when organizations are seriously working on creating platforms in true sense, for the middleware part. By moving to a ‘platform’ thinking, organization combine the ‘service-focus’ with enterprise scale and allow enterprise to leverage the capability of the platform in simplest and easiest manner. That’s when some of the features of self-services etc. come in play that I spoke on in my part 2 of the next-generation ICC blog.

So I were to talk about the reference architecture in the new paradigm (scare to call it but Let us use that term for now), it will be something like this:

So here clearly one can see that BPM is core of the architecture city-plan and then aligned to each of the economy of the application landscape is a middleware of the choice. Each of these middleware connect to a central BPM platform that drives the process context and flow. Connection from BPM to ESB is based on service virtualization layer. This is how I see integration architecture shaping up for lot of organizations and to some extent I believe for now, this is a great way to architect the solution.

Posted by Rakesh Mishra at 11:49 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Next in the next-generation strategy kit is: “High degree of collaboration of the ICC across stakeholders that allows more transparency in the engagement and leads to co-creation of methods of delivery/operation of ICC with stakeholders”.

Basic premise for this view-point is the evolution of the working model for ICC. A typical model for shared services has ‘close door’ system or ‘black box’ system. It means that for rest of the organization, this shared services engagement is only for the delivery of service outcomes. For rest, ICC manages internally. It worked fine during early phase of the evolution of this system since it brought relief to other dependent parties from headache of managing variety of matters; now they could just focus on the outcomes from this shared service. But today, this black box is limiting the overall capability of the organization to innovate and improve

With advent of modern social networking and collaboration practices (like wiki, blogs etc.), possibilities of innovation has gone multi-fold. How to leverage the talent, ideas and learning across the organization in integrated manner, that’s the focus of this point.

As I see, going forward, ICC as system need to bring in closer involvement of other systems (read business units/groups) for co-creation of value. Co-creation of value is the key here. It means that a measurable value goals will drive the ICC in terms of its core focus and ICC will develop ways to deliver these value in collaboration with other stakeholders. Co-creation implies that ICC will closely involve other stakeholder in critical aspects like methodologies, engagement model changes, cross-leveraging of best-practices (across portfolios of domains and technologies) etc. Now stakeholder are not just the actors in the ICC engagement usecases, but they become co-owner of the practices, models, processes and various other operating frameworks being used by ICC. So first of all, why do I think it will work? Okay, here are key reasons for that:

• In this kind of operating model, objectives are co-owned and aligned. Otherwise, typically ICCs run with their agenda that may or may not align to objectives of the business units.
  
• In this model, ICC has greater spectrum of ideas and view-points, directly coming from its service consumers. That has greater chances of success than ICC hypothesizing the solution and methods in silo.
  
• Solutions and methods derived by this model will have naturally greater acceptance from the stakeholders engaging with ICC. That makes life in ICC easy and issues can be now discussed/managed with transparency.

Co-creation as a strategy is gaining wider acceptance with big businesses and as I see, it will fuel up the innovation if done rightly. It also supports the focus of continuous improvement where majority of input from entities being engaged is being turned into an improvement and taken back to them again as a change for better.

Posted by Rakesh Mishra at 11:09 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Business Process Management as a management discipline and key area of IT adoption is now well accepted in corporate world. As world economy faces the prospects of prolonged recession, the management focus towards process efficiency and productivity is bound to increase and BPM offers great opportunities in those areas.

However, recession or no recession, public sector and governments all over the world have always faced the challenges of delivering better services to citizens within the constraints of limited budgets. Over the last decade, with the improved availability of information and improved access to services, the percentage of population falling within the target group of various citizen services has increased. At the same time, the expectations of citizen have also increased when it comes to speed and efficiency of providing services.

Across the globe, public sector has responded to these challenges by adoption of more and more technology enablers for conducting its business. This adoption of technology for government, popularly referred to as ‘e-government’, has focused on improving the information availability, enabling two way communication between citizens and governments (grievances, suggestions mechanisms) and new interaction mediums for providing government services (service provisioning, user charges and tax payment, utility payments etc.)

However, in my opinion, for e-governments to be truly effective in terms of meeting ‘citizen expectations’ and delivering ‘more with less’, following key strategic imperatives need to be considered.
• Focus on developing a ‘consistent’ and ‘transparent’ service delivery framework, going beyond current approach of creating a ‘web based façade’ over existing processes. At the implementation level, such ‘Citizen service delivery framework’ (as I call it) will have the capabilities of handing end to end provisioning of citizen services with key technical features around ‘consolidated view for a citizen’, ‘Identity awareness’ and flexible integration with core back end provisioning systems. 
• Removing any elements of ‘discretion’ and ‘ambiguity’ for applying rules and regulations for majority of high volume services required by common citizens
• Provide internal users (process executioners) with more efficient ‘tools of work’
• Creating a ‘Service delivery framework’ at global level of government and aligning specific departments initiatives to that.

Business Process Management as a discipline and toolset lends itself very well to these objectives. Watch out for next blog for some specific areas where BPM can play the key role at ground level in governments and some key considerations for BPM adoption approach.

Posted by Kapil Mishra at 12:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)