BPM-EAI

I attended a phone call from my 7th floor flat. "Hello", I said but no reply. After a few seconds, the connection got terminated. I cursed the network operator. Thinking about the technologies behind that single phone call, would make you dumbstruck! Today, there are many transport networks catering to different services i.e. data, voice and video. But this is changing fast.

The new buzzwords in telecom are "Next Generation Networks (NGN)" and “Convergence”. NGN is an All -IP based network, where all data, voice and video packets would flow over the IP network. Couple this with the new wireless technologies coming up and what you get is a telecom ecosystem that offers you uninterrupted multiple quality services at high speeds, using many access networks (GSM, WiMax, etc).
 
NGN comes with its own set of challenges. Naming a few -
 · new business models
 · rapid development & deployment of new service bundles
 · emergence of innovative pure-service providers (increasing the competition)
 · regulatory compliance
 · systems integration
 
I believe BPM can help telecom players address most of the above mentioned challenges. It is ‘the’ tool that would enable a vendor to have a distinct edge over the others. By adopting a BPM tool, a telecom vendor can ensure that telecom processes are captured as executable process models. This, in turn, would help in identifying and eliminating the unwanted and redundant process steps. Changes can be made to a process in real time, with minimum effort.

BPM can help break the current telecom process silos, enabling end-to-end process integration. A typical telecom application architecture is very complicated. There are just so many systems (OSS, BSS, NSS, and God knows how many!) !
Let us consider an example - Every telcom player would like to increase customer loyalty. Why is this a problem in the first place? Partly due to the fact that customer information might be stored at many places (read as process silos). With BPM, a full view of the customer data would be available readily. Needless to say, wholistic information would help a vendor to satisfy the customer(s) in a better way. And this is just one example I can think of currently.
 
We have to wait and watch, as the drama unfolds on the telecom stage.
 
This seems to be a good opportunity for BPM!
What do you say

Posted by Komal Sethi at 05:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (5) | TrackBacks (0)

Trust me, I struggled hard to frame the title of this blog and could not make it any simpler. So you need to stay with me on this, read this blog little carefully so that you really know where I’m going with it. Most of this is based on my exposure to industry for EAI, BPM, SOA, SaaS, Cloud and all that can take you to cutting edge and leave your bleeding (if you are at the receiving end unfortunately) without any first aid. Before I get to core of my blog, I think it’s important that I explain the title of my blog so that we are on the same page. Here is the brief blueprint of the blog title.

Tomorrow’s IT eco-system – I mean to bring in your view the practices, culture, hypotheses, written and unwritten principles, thinking patterns and everything else that makes us do thing related to IT evolution the way we do.

Fundamentally doomed DNA – I want to bring your attention to view of things that we are doing today that will become the foundation or DNA of our “way of doing” to the extent that we will do it as most accepted norm, as a natural response to situations around us. While it happens, what lies ahead is a danger of highly inefficient and dysfunctional environment that possibly could make the future progression chaotic, complex, slow and unstable. So that’s the “doom” explained.

So both put together, it simply means that the way we are collectively responding to evolved situations (of industry) today and considering the patterns of our ‘creative forces’ (as they shape up the possibilities), it seems like a ‘bound-to-fail’ story to me. Now, this is not my pessimism. This is a genuine concern only because the only ‘remediation’ force that I can see is the realization of the problems arising from the “consequential damage”. And that’s post-facto effect so it may be too late to restore the eco-system capability before doom happens. And that’s precisely the reason why I’m not pessimistic about it because natural outcome (like any other justice of nature), nature will possibly prohibit the self-destruction and bring some ‘course of correction’ (we all like surprises, don’t we?) so that before we reach the doomed state, we start the journey back to being all right again. That’s the optimism. So let me begin with the core of this blog.

Based on my observations (of which none is extra ordinary) over a long period of time in IT industry, I have compiled 5 basic hypotheses to reflect the current state. These hypotheses are also the root causes that will cause the doom. For the easy understanding, we will refer to all entities that offer something to the market (for commercial or intellectual leadership gain) as “providers”.

Hypothesis 1 -  Problem of plenty: The moment a ‘sticky’ concern/possibility is identified in the industry, there is an extra ordinary surge of ‘me too’ solutions in the market. All in a very short time frame (notice the drastically reduced time-to-market of products and solutions today). We invariably end up having many more solution providers  and (redundant) solutions than the actual solution consumers. That’s quite skewed and unstable market place in my mind.

Hypothesis 2 – Identity crisis: All the ‘me too’ solutions (including view-points, speculations, predictions, products and everything else that can sold to clients) that spring up in no time basically lead to lot of similar looking stuff. But hang on; no one wants to be a copy cat and everyone wants to invent a piece of history, it just can’t be ‘similar’ or ‘same’. So we end up having the ‘creative forces’ re-invent the terminologies and possibly re-establish the fundamentals with different ‘twists’. In the whole deal, focus on the ‘real problem’ is actually lost and we miss many opportunities to evolve.

Hypothesis 3 – Hyper generalization: Putting first two hypotheses together, one can easily sense that pressure on the ‘provider’ community is so high while segment in which solution has to be provided (keeping the differentiation/uniqueness) is seen to be so small to accomodate everyone. So one of the ways the room is getting bigger is by expanding the horizon of the problem space to everything in the eco-system that surrounds the core of the problem. Now that gives absolutely fresh ground, fairly large space to everyone to play and try their ‘innovation/creativity’. While this helps big picture becoming bigger, I realized that it also dilutes the core problem focus because of the generalization and expansion. I’m sure one will agree that expanding the thought process to big picture happens quickly and easily but doing justice to big picture in terms of actually solving the problem with focus, details and capability takes much more (effort/time) purely because of sheer size/complexity. No one has time to solve it so devil is left to mess up the details while ‘providers’ are busy creating happiness around the ‘big picture’.

Hypothesis 4 – Running before walking: Yes, no one has time to wait and no one needs to wait today because first principle of the business today is that ‘faster is always better’ no matter what. That’s what many principles of efficiency/six sigma/JiT etc. teach. So things are getting complex to deal with but nothing can be slowed down at any cost (unless some natural disaster forces the slow down, we have seen couple of them in recent past, but doesn’t really matter). So in essence, players in the industry are forced to run when they have barely learnt how to walk. It is leading to distortion and disorientation and over-play of short-term concerns. My sense is that ‘forced intellectual progression’ (because that can happen at lightning speed as opposed to much slower real-life  progression) is causing widening of the gap between what is real and what is ‘hypothetical’. It is also increasing the stress between as-is and to-be and resulting into a constant pressure to move toward  ever-ending goals. One could argue that ever-ending goals are truly ‘long term’ but in today’s context these goals are almost ever-ending in the short timeframe in which they are supposed to be accomplished and when they are not accomplished, goals are changed. Are we going too fast and waiting for a disaster to slow us down and reconcile the gaps?

Hypothesis 5 – Missing real stuff: I think that’s the outcome of all that is described above. With many to solve your problems and infinite ways to solve your problem, most of what is around is unfortunately ‘vapor’. That’s sad because if we consider amount of ‘person days’ of effort, money and time that is going into creation of this vapor, this is extra ordinarily, astronomically high wealth being underutilized. There are very few sincere who are onto the real problem, breaking their head in dealing with the devil of the details but in the battle of commercialization, they are boxed as well. I mean, yes, while all this ‘doomed’ stuff is happening at large, my optimism is alive that few sincere brains are working hard across the globe, across the organizations who in sociological parlance are doing the human welfare work. But will they be able to neutralize the vapor community and win the battle in long term, I hope so but your guess is as good as mine.

So that's where thing stand in my mind. Unanswered, unresolved, but challenging enough to look at.

This blog turned out to be highly philosophical, far more than I planned. But I’m comfortable with it. I personally feel that there are many out there who  are thinking the same and this may be a good opportunity to confirm my hypotheses. If we recognize the problem, we may possibly have something on these lines to change the way we do thing, starting with each one of us. Hoping to see some response.

Posted by Rakesh Mishra at 09:19 AM | Permalink | Comments (6) | TrackBacks (0)

For many of you reading this, the term B2B may be synonymous with the term EDI. And this was not entirely wrong a few years back. But let us just say, things have evolved since.  As for the others, you can safely skip the next paragraph and read on.

EDI was, at one point, one of the most popular and widely used methods for enabling in B2B transactions and it still is. But B2B as a term encompasses a much wider array of themes today, that enable Businesses to collaborate with each other in a more efficient, cost effective and innovative manner.  And this very significant change in perception of B2B is what this article will talk about.

For a very long time, B2B and EDI teams were viewed as purely technical teams that translated business documents to a digital form that was understood by other  trading partners.  It was not an area the Management would be interested in dabbling their heads in, so long as everything was running fine. Mind you, EDI has always been and always will be critical to businesses, as it typically has a direct impact on their  toplines.

However, over the last few years we have seen technologies and products in the Integration and Business Process Management space finding an increasing common ground with products from the B2B space. And this extension of these B2B product suites into the Integration and BPM space and vice versa though understandable, given the similarity of their core function i.e. data transformation in both these areas,  has opened up a wide array of possibilities.

Visionaries in this space have shifted their focus over the years from atomic messages to integrating entire business processes, bringing about a paradigm shift in the approach to both Integration and B2B.  This shift from being responsible to the final atomic message to being responsible for the business process or the sequence of steps that achieve a business goal either entirely within the organization or across organizational borders with trading partners, has been responsible for this huge change in perception we have seen of Integration and B2B.

Standards have evolved in parallel keeping pace with this shift in focus, moving from simple message based standards like ANSI X12, EDIFACT etc to business process based standards like ebXML, Rosettanet, BPML, WSFL, XLANG etc, in the process establishing the ‘Business Process’ as the basic unit of measure.

So where has all this led us?

“EDI  - Oh that Techie stuff!!” – Alas! It is not a phrase that will be heard very often anymore. The focus on Business processes has necessitated the active involvement of business personnel outside of the core IT team. This has resulted in an increased dialogue and visibility across both the business and IT teams, resulting in better informed decisions, that take both business and technology perspectives into view.   This active interaction also  inherently ensures identification of issues/bottlenecks that may have otherwise not have been noticed or given the right priority.

Other benefits we have come to see include monitoring/alerting, visibility and collaboration. We will not dwelve into the details of each of these here, as we would need a separate post to do justice to each of them.

However, it is important to touch upon the impact of these changes to the B2B world. With the new ability to provide visibility to Business Processes, businesses now have the choice of extending this facility to their trading partners. This will greatly improve visibility across organizations leading to better planning,  forecasting, fewer and more efficient exchanges and a higher level of collaboration.

Initiatives such as CPFR- Continuous Planning Forecasting and Replenishment  and VMI have taken collaboration to a whole new level, where the manufacturer makes ordering decisions on behalf of the retailer on the basis of shared information received from the retailer.

These going forward will be extended to the smallest of trading partners enabling them to do business in a much better and smarter manner with their larger counterparts.

Posted by Vinod Gopalakrishnan at 07:26 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)