BPM-EAI

While I move on to the part 4 of value innovation in B2B which is “De-risking of Business Continuity and Growth”, I just hope that previous blogs in this series have been good read. Let us push on the journey further for B2B.

I think business continuity and growth, both are going to be critical dimensions of businesses of tomorrow. While growth aspect sets the adequate measures and direction to predictably deal with the implications of the growth in future terms, business continuity focuses on possible scenarios of business loss risks and provides adequate arrangements to handle it early enough before risk materializes. Both of these aspects are core and close to business and hence have very significant importance for B2B strategy.

De-risking requires good understanding of business continuity risks and growth impacts for B2B eco-system. De-risking is all about modeling a strategy around risks and growth impacts and converting them into various elements of the enterprise in terms of processes, technology infrastructure, knowledge and organizational structures. Specific to B2B, here are few of the important business continuity / growth risk cases around which value innovation focus is required:

• Regulatory compliance – Many of the B2B business processes are greatly dominated by the regulatory compliance norms. While many of them already exist, many more keep emerging. New compliance or changes to existing compliance norms simply means high priority ‘reengineering’ of business processes and systems in order to meet the deadline with accuracy of compliance fulfillment, failing which could result into penalty and undesirable business continuity loss.
• Partner system compatibility (exiting and future both) to integrate with your business systems – B2B fundamentally rests on the capability of two business partners to integrate their business dialogues in terms of information and supply chain business exchanges. In order to have highly agile and efficient partner integration capability, it is must that B2B set up in the organization is able to provide wide variety of compatible options to partners to integrate with without needing extra ordinary deal of changes in their systems. This makes very easy to do business with and not getting entangled in technical complicacies of connecting your partners to your business eco-system.
• Contractual obligations for Service level performance – Businesses need to be monitoring the service levels of their contractual obligations to keep the supply chain with business partners valued. If service level performance is not being monitored and is not being fine tuned, it can easily result into partners switching the business contracts and trying alternatives.
• Security of the confidential information being exchanged – B2B exchange by nature is exposed to security risks. In order to provide worry-free business exchange opportunity to partners, it is essential that necessary security constructs are built into core of the B2B platform and it has capability to deliver the sensitive business information to partners in highly secured form. Further to that, while delivery can be secure, organizations need to worry about safe receipt of the information and hence they need to work with their partners to agree upon the security policies/strategies/instruments in order to have a secure business eco-system.
• Disaster recovery of the B2B operations – like any other business component, disaster recovery (of information, systems and infrastructure in our context) mechanism needs to be secured. Given that in B2B, information, system and infrastructure include the partner side as well, disaster recovery should be able to re-establish the entire business eco-system and not just one side. It makes B2B disaster recovery a little more complex.
• Dependency on the Partner performance – In business terms, organizations depend on the performance of partner business activities in order to make entire supply chain of the business process effective and efficient. Like a weakest link of the chain story, organizations may fail to optimize their business if the partners are not performing well. So keeping a real-time eye on the partner performance that can be audited and reliably used to create partner improvement programs will be key to evolve a highly strong partner eco-system.
• Quality of the decision making – Quality of the decision making (reliability, accuracy) in terms of B2B related business decisions requires ability to instrument the KPIs related to B2B eco-system and ability to see a continuous spectrum of trends/historical data-points. Lack of such capability will lead to guess work and may end up forcing the organizations into decisions that are not appropriate.
• Adability of the organizational and IT eco-systems for the business environment changes – Business environment changes are today one of the greatest forces causing disruptions in the organizations. Organization’s ability to quickly adapt these changes through IT eco-system reconfiguration gives tremendous competitive advantages.

So in summary, one of the important values to be looked after in B2B space is about the de-risking of business continuity and that needs to be by-design and not to be ignored. Organizations may not realize this value unless it impacts them but when it impacts, they may neither have time nor ability to transform in given time which could mean lot of compromises.

In the next blog, I will touch upon the aspects of next value: “Lead-time to Deliver Business Value” .

Posted by Rakesh Mishra at 04:34 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

 Past couple of months I have to go through serious of medical issues in my family with mixed feelings about the practices being followed here in India. With some googling and to support my conviction I found India's standing in health index ranked at 128 with index value at 0.602 ( Norway being 1 at 0.963 , Srilanka at 93 rd position, Russia at 62nd position).

 

Due to limited scope I would briefly touch upon role of technology in health services. Health sector in India seems to be unaware of a widely followed practice such as preventive medical programs. If we can get insurance companies devise a process supported by technology to regularly follow up with the insured people check their basic medical reports like pressure, blood sugar and other ailments we can always be ahead of the impending disease that is about to strike us. I think the consciousness to regularly check health is yet to form in India. An automated business process with various alerts which regularly prompts people for all kinds of medical check up, sends alerts in case of any abnormalities, regularly suggesting various need based diets, vitamins is required. Since multiple channels of information (phone, internet, manual), many dispersed applications need to integrated a BPM tool or a EAI technology to facilitate information flow would be very helpful. At initial stage we would really have to rely on lightweight open source based BPM tools or options to keep things simple. Since its a new concept it can be rolled out on a pilot mode as a study and then expanded to fully harness the benefits of technology.I must add here this kind of automated preventive health care may not  available in US or UK (at least in my limited exposure;while working in these countries) except for getting call back from my dentist for regular check up ( but then he made me pay 5 bucks extra to send me reminder to go to him!!).

Anyways, I haven't really checked data to consider the options but given the circumstances and the stage we are, if its for India, it has to be something easy light weight , cost effective ready to market. Cost would be a key thing to even attract any health provider ( Wochard, Apollo etc or any other NGO ) closer to anything like this. If I am allowed to think of some way to help the much considerably the underpriveleged I guess the process should be some kind of mass process through we can track and monitor progress of area. Here again cost would be key issue. We would need frugality everywhere. It would be difficult to consider  a heavy weight tool (with huge licensing costs and extensive implementation option) based BPM here. we would need something light weight like may be a  Frugal BPM :).......A new term..( wow!!) :)

 

Posted by Maloy Halder at 08:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

The T-Mobile’s wonder toy Sidekick has recently been in the news for all the wrong reasons. For the uninitiated, the Sidekick is a Smartphone meets Iphone (no puns intended) device which boasts of a whole plethora of tools and features for the mobile generation making it an affordable wireless e-mail/phone/PDA hybrid.

Earlier this month, T-Mobile announced to the Sidekick’s users that all of their data has been lost, and attributed it to a server failure at Microsoft’s (yes.. they own the platform) Danger subsidiary. The fiasco has of course over shadowed the the total data loss at Ma.gnolia earlier this year, which had been the existing benchmark for user data evaporation.

The fact that the platform never had a more robust disaster recovery strategy is something that most analysts are finding difficult to accept. Well, given that the data center was not owned by the actual consumer service provider (T-Mobile), is leading them to comment that this undermines the reliability of the entire concept of Cloud Computing. ZDNet called it “one of the biggest cloud computing disasters so far.” Cnet wrote that the incident “threatens to put a dark cloud” over Microsoft’s cloud ambitions.

While I don’t really participate in this doomsday prognosis, this does highlight that the key enterprise architecture best practices are still relevant irrespective of the ownership pattern of the solution components. In this case, the consumer (T-Mobile), never paid for a disaster recovery SLA and hence they never got it. So, the miss would really be on the part of the consumer than the service provider. 

I believe, the basic hypothesis of Cloud Computing bears an uncanny resemblance to the old (ancient ?) paradigm of Application Service Providers (ASPs), and that’s a connection that should not be lost while we try to decompile the jargon around us. One of the unfortunate offshoots of the recent hype generated by Cloud Computing is that most IT professionals are finding it difficult to visualize this connection. Buying v/s Building has been an issue that most organizations have been grappling with for the last many years and going the “cloud” way has often been seen as an extension of that approach.

However, I believe, we need to understand that buying services and platforms doesn’t really absolve the enterprise from key responsibilities of defining, governing and owning the Enterprise Architecture. With the SLA based approach, where most platform providers promise you that you get what you pay for, it becomes ever more important that your shopping list has been deliberated upon thoroughly. This move towards commoditization of the enterprise platform, essentially means that the onus shifts back on the EAs to keep a tighter watch on what they are buying and using.

Some of the Key areas where the role of EA will become much more relevant are :

Business Architecture
The evolution of the enterprise’s business will continue and the EA will need to analyse and cater to impact of that on the overall architecture (this greatly depends on what components are pushed out). The move to the Cloud might provide the agility required to respond to this change, but that will need to scrutinized and managed closely.

Information Architecture
Again, the role of the EA will continue to be crucial to ensure the capture, processing and reporting of business critical information throughout the enterprise. While the actual control over some parts of the information model may depend on the way the data resides across the cloud components and the on-premise components, the overall ownership has to be with the enterprise.

Policy & Risk Architecture
With the increased chatter going out the enterprise gateway, there will be an increased focus on ensuring the robustness of the external communications gateway. This will be less towards the actual technical communication, since most of that will get consolidated towards industry standards, but more towards security and policy enforcement across the enterprise. It will require architects to figure out the right solutions for identity management, data at rest security, transactional security, and physical security. At the end of the day the enterprise is ultimately accountable for the data stored in a SaaS data center (refer to the Financial Services legislation where FSI's are legally bound to the implications of an offsite breach no matter what type of contract was defined with the SaaS provider ).

In conclusion, the fact that the platform has been federated on either ends of the enterprise gateway, shouldn’t in anyway undermine the role of the Enterprise architects. Overall governance and ownership is going to be as important as ever, irrespective of how we federate the actual solution components across the enterprise or outside it.

Posted by Maloy Patnaik at 03:55 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Service-oriented architecture (SOA), has become a familiar term for architecture community in the last few years. The paradigm of business users creating application functionality was too exciting to ignore. This was done through building and managing business processes, all hosted on an enterprise service bus – thus disentangling the integration spaghetti forever.

However, with tragic tales of SOA projects failing to live up to the hype, the time phenomenon has highlighted that a light and agile methodology might be the way forward as opposed to traditional approaches.

Most service based solutions have been based on the proverbial holy grails such as Enterprise wide Canonical Data Model and Service Bus. However, the next wave would require a shift towards more efficient variants that are tailored to the specific needs of business, with prioritization based on market dynamics, enterprise inertia, business priorities, investment strategy, and ROI..

Skipping the Canonical Data Model to move towards a federated MDM strategy and a brokerage approach to communication between systems is the way forward. This should ideally be based around a distributed data strategy that leaves information in the source systems but provides references between them. Consider the impossibility of imposing the Canonical Data Model on the software-as-a-service (SaaS) providers and the virtue of this approach becomes apparent.

Similarly, the Enterprise Service Bus is a myth as well. The entire enterprise will never get on a single ‘bus’. This is primarily since there never will be a business case strong enough pull funding for the strategic service model on legacy systems. A more pragmatic approach would be to divide the enterprise bus into two logical sections. These are, the Clean Data Bus that hosts enterprise services adhering to the enterprise service framework, and the Dirty Bus to host specific services for legacy and non-adhering systems. The dirty bus clearly scores over the erstwhile point-to-point integration, offering greater control over auditing, logging and exception handling.

To define the SOA roadmap well, it is critical to understand that it is not just about processes or services definition but also technology and people that will make or break the initiative. For an organization to adopt this strategy, it needs to be mature enough to take the risk of initial investment. Organizations with a clear focus on implementation will reap long-term benefits.

Note: The above post has been based on an article co-authored by me on the same theme to be published soon.

Posted by Maloy Patnaik at 02:28 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

In the last blog of this blog series, I introduced need of scaling up of the B2B operations. Part 3 will focus on the “Business Experience Quality of all the Stakeholders”, a very critical aspect of the doing business with global partner eco-system.

Conventional B2B (say up to early 2000) has been mostly about opening up a window from enterprise to partners in order to exchange business documents. Security was major concerns and more importantly the whole business model of exploiting the partner eco-system in inclusive manner was literally non-existent except for few B2B pioneers here and there. In integration world, how we refer to P2P, which is point to point connectivity and interaction model, similarly, I think the conventional model of B2B, is really a P2P form of the business exchange outside the enterprise.

In the more evolved state of business supply chain, B2B is more of a business collaboration hub and hence it necessitates the transformation in the way B2B has been looked at by all stakeholders. While in the conventional B2B model, it was a technical necessity, today it is way of doing business that identifies the brand, reputation and maturity of a business organization. Overall experience of doing business is an important aspect that business partners care for. Experience is a soft factor, however if I were to broadly dig into the DNA of this experience, it could be including the elements of:

• Partner friendliness of the B2B processes  – this defines the business quality of the experience. Partners will value the B2B process maturity a lot where they don’t have to deal with process level redundancies, issue of data quality, painful / time consuming exception handling process, fragmented and disjointed processes or for that matter simple but important thing like visibility of important business information.
  
• Usability, adaptability, flexibility and reliability of the B2B platform shared with and integrated with the partner systems – B2B platform is the core around which B2B collaboration will revolve in today’s technologically advanced business landscapes. Hence it will be a matter of great interest for partners where B2B platform is highly usable (the user interaction side for facilities like partner self-service portal etc.), can adapt easily to technological maturity of the partners without much fuss, is highly reliable in terms of output and performance etc.
  
• Ease and speed with which partners can be on boarded – how quickly and how easily partners can be connected to enterprise partner network and how seamlessly business exchanges can begin is a great measure of enterprise’ B2B capability. A lengthy and complicated partner on boarding process/method not only discourages the partners to get into the network but also hinders the enterprise to quickly act on the new business partnership opportunities.
  
• Reduced complexity of rolling out enchancements /new functionality to partner network – further to on boarding, ongoing changes and maintenance activities are another set of complex and time consuming part of the B2B segment that partners are worried of. If B2B platform allows quick changes, without too much cycle-time of testing/deployment for every small change, it makes life easier and worry-free for partners. Partners  should be able to deal with the B2B platform changes/enhancements without disrupting their business and without costing them heaven.
  
• Value enhancement to partners while doing business with the enterprise (through software services, infrastructure and knowledge sharing) – a rare consideration but increasingly becoming popular in which partners seek opportunity of their value enhancement while working with their partners. Such value enhancement could include software services/utilities/infrastructure extended to partners for free/low cost basis, business knowledge shared in terms of improvements, strategies and future opportunities etc. This take the relationship between partner from mere information/transaction data exchange to true business collaboration with long term relationship in mind.
  
• Opportunity to optimize and improve the B2B processes for mutual benefits (including reduction in cost per transaction) – very similar to previous one, partners look forward to have a say in on going fine tuning and optimization of the B2B process that brings value both to the enterprise as well to the partners. This sometime may mean the changes in the B2B platform, processes or methods for the enterprise but it goes long way in creating highly strategic and powerful partner network.

This, to me, does look like a different expectations from B2B than conventional B2B stuff in more than one ways. With business eco-systems getting more sophesticated, I personally believe that something of this sort is going to define the value system of B2B transformation and lot of that is already happening as we look around.

In the next blog, I will talk about the ‘Derisking of business continuity and growth’ which is becoming critical as supply chains are expanding across geographies across diverse set of partners.

Posted by Rakesh Mishra at 07:32 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)