BPM-EAI

 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 8:37 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 3:55 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)