BPM-EAI

In general the discussion around BPM relevance, adoption approaches and implementation pre-supposes the IT landscape to be a mature one with the presence of multiple legacy applications hosting business processes and rules. BPM in this context is positioned more as a remedy for ills and salvation for sins that have found their way into IT landscape namely, process execution in application silos, meshing of process logic and business rules with application code, lack of visibility into process execution and inability of applications to respond to business changes.

However, an entirely new paradigm emerges when we start looking at BPM in context of a green field IT landscape and such examples abound around us. A new start up organization in the process of setting up IT infrastructure, an existing organization setting up a new division or line of business or an organization aiming at large scale IT transformation are all candidates fitting in this scenario. Lets examine in more details some interesting aspects of BPM applicability in green field IT landscape.

BPM-driven approach places ‘Business Processes’ in forefront of IT systems conceptualization and design. This approach also termed as ‘Top down’ approach to BPM starts with forming a process centric view of business and from there drills deeper into system design and implementation view. In such a scenario, ‘process’ and not the ‘data model’ acts as the basis of organization meta model and drives system design and implementation phases. In a green field IT landscape, organizations have a great opportunity to develop the process model view upfront along with addressing organizational aspects like process ownership, governance and lifecycle management before the deluge of system implementation starts.

Another area where green field IT landscape can greatly benefit from BPM approach is the optimal selection of processes that need to be enabled on BPM platform. In a mature IT landscape, design of process scope around core transaction processing systems and BPM platform offers its own challenges, in terms of user resistance, training and re-skilling effort and system integration. However in green field set-up, the design of core (ERP) and peripheral (BPM platform) processes can be done based purely on business needs and objectives. Such a design is more optimal as system and environmental constraints play a minimal role in decision compared to mature IT landscape. Organizations should not let go of this opportunity in the initial phases of IT systems design. Here I can quote the example of a leading university in middle-east that embarked on a detailed process analysis and modelling initiative as the first step towards setting up IT systems and then formed a system based view splitting process scope around packaged ERP application and BPM platform based on business needs and nature of processes. This approach enabled the university to strike an optimal balance between core transactions processing ERP system and BPM platform in terms of process scope.

However, the adoption of these strategies requires these organizations to be strongly ‘process focused. During initial stage of IT systems design, there are few ‘urgency’ factors that drive the case for BPM and it is very easy for organizations to miss this opportunity in absence of ‘process driven approach’ to business, a key pre-requisite for BPM success any which way.

Posted by Kapil Mishra at 08:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I talked about the cost effectiveness as the first value for the B2B value innovation. Next one that I will discuss in this blog is “Ability to seamlessly scale to support the business growth”.

There are two important segment to this value statement. First is “supporting the business growth”. In my view ultimately all IT/Business investments somewhere have expectations to bring business growth for the enterprise. Let us say with appropriate business strategies enterprise is able to expand the business footprint and is able to grow the business. As business grows, it will sooner or later start exerting tremendous pressure for  various enterprise capabilities and stretch their capacity to limits. It is a known behavior and typically happens because the enterprise capability like operational infrastructure etc. are designed with certain assumptions.

Second segment is “ability to seamlessly scale”. Now from value expectations, enterprises really cannot invest extraordinary funds into designing hyper-capacity in the enterprise eco-system due to ROI and cash-flow reasons. So next best thing that enterprises need to have a great scalability built into the enterprise systems. This will mean that as stress on the enterprise systems (including people, processes, infrastructure, IT systems etc.) increases, incremental capability can be added to take care of the stretched demand arising from the business growth. As business growth continues and it keeps putting stretched demand on the enterprise systems, incremental capacity addition continues.

Practically a particular enterprise eco-system will have a range of capacity in which it can serve (with all incremental capacity additions) appropriately. Beyond that range, it will start breaking down no matter how much additional capacity you add. This is because now fundamentally the enterprise eco-system has to be re-designed with different scale and principles in mind. For practical purpose, that kind of mega-reformation of the enterprise eco-system is a major transformation and is outside of purview of my discussion here. I will go with assumption that existing enterprise eco-systems have a good range that they can serve with incremental capacity additions over reasonable period of time and that's what the B2B eco-system has to be designed for when investing into it.

So in simple terms, from B2B perspective, as business grows, more and more business partners will be added to the business eco-system. B2B infrastructure and overall business system for B2B needs to have capability to keep scaling without needing any fundamental reformation. To make it happen, enterprises will need to analyze their end-to-end enterprise system for B2B and investigate every segment/component of it from this value perspective. It could be technology platform, could be business process quality, working capital capacity, service delivery capacity (including vendor sourcing) or capacity for engaging with partner market place. One or more of these value platforms can be engineered to create the value of scaling for business growth. I will discuss in more detail about the specific strategies to achieve this value innovation.

Next blog in the series: “Business Experience Quality for all Stakeholders”....

Posted by Rakesh Mishra at 04:15 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)