BPM-EAI

Since All Business Process Management Software packages have their own ways and methods of making BPM implementations successful , more often than not , BPMS consultants take the BPMS product architecture driven implementation as the BPM way to go

However, in my mind, BPMS all starts from BPM and if we understand that right , this is all that is to be done for any BPMS implementation (inspite of the complexities or differences in underlying product architecture)

So What is this Business Process Management Software Implementation all about?

Let me try by picking on the basics here and start with Business Process by itself

Business Process is a coherent set of Activities and decisions * (List of activities and decisions) defined in an *Order( activities done in an order to achieve certain states ) acting upon a defined set of entities (business/data) to Achieve a Goal ( Objective of the process) within a set of defined metrics (KPI of processes) and done by Collaborating set of Roles *( Actors doing these roles) having *defined Responsibilities and has Interactions with outside world ( Triggering events /Subsequent Events/integrations

If you would now notice, this is all to a business process and surprisingly to configuring the BPMS packages as well

Let's see it again in new light and focus on the words in bold in the definition given above

Activities and decisions

Order( activities done in an order to achieve certain states )

entities (business/data)

Goal

Metrics

Collaborating set of Roles ( Actors doing these roles)

defined Responsibilities

Interactions

So, let's think again, what do we do while implementing business process management software and align it to the words in Bold above?

• Understand the key business objective of the process and ensure activities/sequence and aligned to achieving it (Goal metrics)

• Define the key business entities in that process ( Business/data/Class , different packages do it differently ) (entities (business/data))

• Based on objectives and entities, Model the process (Activities and decisions) in an Order( activities done in an order to achieve certain states )

• Configure participants/actors (*Collaborating set of Roles *( Actors doing these roles))

with Defined Responsibilities)

• Define Interfaces /triggers to get data /start/stop an activity and UI's to get inputs (Interactions with outside world ( Triggering events /Subsequent Events/integrations/UI's )

WOW....Wasn't BPMS implementation simple enough?

However, before we close this topic, it is important not to forget the last word in BPM ( Management) , it is most important before starting this madness about BPMS packages configuration to ensure and understand how ,what and why would we manage this business process we just configured above

In Extremely simple words, Managing a business process is all about

-Business Process Management (BPM)

• Capture the process

» Models (Descriptive /Execution)

» Documentation

• Analyze the process

» Productivity

» Efficiency

» Cost reduction

» Speed to Market

» Exception management

» Scalability/Maintainability

• Improve the process

» Standardization

» Automation

» Optimization

• Keep on doing step 2 and 3

All configuration of BPMS packages ( however different because of their underlying product architecture) revolves around these 2 simple definitions and each and every step done by BPMS consultants in configuring these packages is based on one of these definitions as defined above

So, does a PEGA or Lombardi or an ALBPM implementation now make sense as more of BPM rather than just another package configuration ? Think of defining the flows or the activities or setting up roles and users or integrations with data sources , they all fit in this scenario as described above

Posted by Himanshu Arora at 10:45 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Scenario: Thinking out of the Box

Gatsby was chewing the end of his ballpoint pen nervously. In fifteen minutes an unruly mob impatiently waiting outside would inundate his store. Soon after that, some of the best apparels in his store would simply fly out of the shelves. In fifteen minutes, the clock would strike 6 am and the shutters of his Gloucester store would open to the ‘Boxing day Sale’, the acid test for any UK retailer.

Through the blinds in the shop window, Gatsby could spot the seasoned buyers in the five hour old queue outside his shop. They are the hard nosed bargain hunters with granola bars and bottled water. They have come prepared for the long wait. Boxing Day on 26th December is the one day they have been waiting for the entire year. The day when dramatic price decreases are tagged on the most coveted retail brands. Most stores face stampedes and sometimes severe injuries as these big sales draw massive crowd.

Gatsby’s sprawling 14,000 sq feet store was the newest of the high end apparel retailer - Luke, inaugurated less than three weeks ago. It offered a wide range of apparels from the high end Soleur fashion wear to their own affordable range of Men’s office wear. He spent his entire savings in the Army for this franchise store located in the far end of High Street, a prime commercial area. Most of his staff were new recruits, but he was actually confident of handling the crowd.

Gatsby’s confidence stemmed from the fact that the store was equipped with cutting-edge retail technology. The patented plannogram retopology system leverages shopper’s positional data to instruct how to dynamically adjust the store layout at different times of the day, to maximise conversions. A state of the art inventory replenishment system can anticipate sudden demand and instantaneously triggering the supply chain to prevent stockouts.

As a franchise partner, he and his staff received 2 months of retail training from Luke’s corporate office to handle any kind of situation including peaking sales. Their comprehensive business process management systems had workflows covering every aspects of their operations from procurement to point-of-sales.

Best-laid Plans

Sophie, an assistant billing clerk, almost crouched when the shutters opened releasing a noisy stampede of bargain shoppers into their shop floor. In fact, nearly the very moment one of them stood grinning in front of her holding a pair of Soleur boots like a prized catch in one hand and a credit card in the other. One hour later Gatsby heaved a sigh of relief as everything seemed pretty smooth so far. From his desk, his customised operations dashboard showed a healthy inventory turnover and strong hourly sales. But outside his room, the situation was not quite pleasant.

The queues at the eight billing counters were exceedingly long. This was not unexpected for a Boxing Day but the queue movement was extremely slow taking upto 10 minutes per person. Pat, the shop floor manager, tried to speed up things in vain. Finally he threw his hands up and admitted in his thick Irish accent, “We need to tell Gatsby now”.

What Gatsby found out truly surprised him. For the first time, majority of the purchases crossed the £100 barrier. It occurred to him that every purchase above £100 would involve issuing the club card at the Point of Sale. Filling a lengthy form in front of the irate customers is hardly the best use of time. The solution was to simply inform them to produce the bill on a later date to collect the card. However the challenge was to alter the business process to reflect the current reality.

Gatsby called Mark, their BPM Architect in corporate office. Mark quickly grasped the situation at hand and offered an interesting solution. “We have a Boxing day special workflow to handle such scenario. It was developed by Asil one of our Machester branch managers last year. Our social BPM module can find that for you. Just enter the term - Boxing day and approve the activation”. This was music to Gatsby’s ears and it worked exactly as Mark said. In addition, it contained various minor improvements in the workflow like suppressing redundant promotion confirmation pop-ups that magically shortened the queues.

Social BPM: A Fundamental Shift in BPM

“Never tell people how to do things. Tell them what to do and they will surprise you with their ingenuity.” - General George S. Patton

Social BPM can, without exaggeration, save your job in such critical situations which are edge-cases not often foreseen by the process designers. Often, it is impossible to create a process that can handle every eventuality. If it attempts to do is, it comes with an added complexity that affects its acceptability.

Social BPM is defined by Clay Richardson as “Processes developed and improved through the use of social technologies and techniques”. BPM thought leaders have been long advocating the importance of agility in creating business processes. We can no longer rely on the traditional BPR methodology of AS-IS and TO-BE process modelling. The turnaround time has to be faster and more importantly, the processes will have to be developed in a more bottom-up manner.

Collaborative creation of content is happening everywhere from wikis (Wikipedia) to news (Twitter). It is in the very nature of most human endeavours to work collaboratively. Creating a process and following it might be effective only in the most mundane activities. Ideally, BPM should provide an expressive framework which facilitates reflecting the complexities of real-life processes within rich and evocative contexts. Social BPM seems to a step in that direction.

Posted by Arun Ravindran at 11:45 AM | Permalink | Comments (5) | TrackBacks (0)

“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it”, said George Santayana. Since, times immemorial civilizations flourished and perished. Many empires too reached their zeniths and could not stay there for long due to various reasons. Roman Empire - is a classic example for downfall, while in its peaks, “pax romana” was the call of the day. The measure of success or prosperity is usually got by the way the Agriculture products, sustenance of the populace, Trade and Commerce etc are handled by the Rulers of the Empire.

When we talk of decline of Roman Empire, the astrophysicist Mario Livio mentions that Trade and Commerce was getting extremely difficult towards end of the Roman Empire as their number system (Roman Number System) was not capable of handling large numbers [1]. Imagine multiplication of two large numbers in Roman Number System 3,786 with 3,843 - which would be MMMDCCLXXXVI by MMMDCCCXLIII.

If we extend the same analogy to today’s Globalized world, Empires are Enterprises/Businesses which are trans-national; while their IT infrastructures are similar to the erstwhile number systems. Any Enterprise if wants to gain global dominance, should be ably be supported by its IT infrastructure, which needs to be agile, flexible and be able to handle any given scenario. Based on the scale of business the infrastructure needs to expand itself, based on the changes in the market dynamics, the infrastructure should be able to adapt itself.

One cannot change the number system of a place overnight; likewise the IT infrastructure once chosen by Enterprise cannot be changed overnight. Hence choosing the products or applications by the CIO is of paramount importance to any Enterprise for its success or failure in today’s market.

Infosys understands the need for helping its customers in choosing the right BPM tool for their IT landscape based on their unique needs. Infosys’ Comprehensive Evaluation of BPM and BRM Packaged Tools (InCEPT) has helped many a customers with their selection of BPM tool or BPM modernization.

In 2008, one of our customers was having Legacy workflow system, from a very popular EAI and BPM Product Company. When the sunset of the application was announced, the plans for modernization of the workflow application were made. They approached Infosys for selection of the tool and subsequent migration of the workflow activity. The popular perception would be that a latest Workflow tool from the same vendor would be suggested, due to incumbency factor. However after evaluating the 246 parameters of the Enterprise needs, Infosys suggested another popular and standard BPM tool as replacement. Those 246 parameters were the metrics suggested by InCEPT framework. Till date the customer is not having any reason to complain and is more than happy to have used InCEPT.

For more details about InCEPT please visit link

[1] The Golden Ration: the story of Phi, the Extraordinary Number of Nature, Art and Beauty - written by Mario Livio has the mention of the same in the chapter - 5 titled, “The good son of nature”

Posted by Anil Prasad Kurnool at 11:41 AM | Permalink | Comments (6) | TrackBacks (0)

The recent news on Google stopping further development on their offering Google Wave did create mixed responses. Thousands of fans even registering support for it and critics liked it. However my interest was on the messaging platform that it used. Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP) has finally come of age and given its high profile usage such as Google Wave and Talk, there is a thought process if XMPP can be used within organizations for middleware or EAI. It might sound surprising on how a protocol that is used in Internet Messaging services could be used in EAI, but XMPP has evolved and extended itself in the Message oriented Middleware (MOM) domain as well. In my opinion this could be a new dimension for EAI.

At present most of the popular MOMs are Queue based such as Java Messaging Service (JMS) where the Architecture principle is centralization. A concept of decentralization is noted in TIBCO’s Rendezvous which can work both at a multicast as well as broadcast but is proprietary and customers are moving away from it. XMPP is a welcome standard in EAI and compliments services like JMS by providing an open standard decentralized platform. One exclusive advantage of XMPP is that security is ensured with Simple Authentication and Security Layer (SASL) and Transport Layer Security (TSL) which has been built into its specifications. So no more botheration of creating a separate security layer over the MOM. Other popular advantages of having a XML based protocol, support for extensions such as HTTP binding, service discovery, File transfer make it quite adaptable to EAI within an enterprise as well as for B2B and B2C integrations. However, it still has not been able to impress any EAI Product Vendors and only example of an EAI implementation mentioned in xmpp.org has been of French Administration employing J-EAI (XMPP’s own EAI product). It remains to be seen whether XMPP makes a mark like JMS or not.

Posted by Narayanan Chathanur at 8:53 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Can organizations solve real-time problems by gathering business intelligence in a dynamic way? This is a million dollar question in recent times in every major organization and seeking answer in high times of huge IT Investments. Will every organization would be able to tap the real value potential from their SOA and BPM and so called traditional integrations. Yes this write-up will present that how CEP (Complex Event Processing) has changed the system integration landscape in a dynamic way, coupling with SOA and BPM platforms and serve the real time event generation.

Every organization starting from retail, banking, automobile, entertainment, insurance and healthcare industries pose with different set of questions and finding answer through event generation on real time.

• What combinations of products are our customers buying right now, and how should we spend our advertising dollars?
• Do securities pricing trends indicate a buying or a selling opportunity right now?
• Are our new vehicles taking a hit in the right locations with right directions and what the customer wants to have?
• How many times customers visit the online portal for specific products and what they are interested off?
• Which sequence of banking customer activities happening now should we investigate for cross sell up sell opportunities?

Recently there has been a major swing from normal integration landscape to a modern era integration with concepts of Enterprise service bus, Service oriented architecture and business process management. Every enterprise spends huge time in investing high integration strategy thinking of SOA based platform and BPM based integrations. Well when everything is wired and made easy, the next level comes into picture how well the whole IT infrastructure can be tapped to seek business potentials. Well CEP (Complex event processing) is one of the top 8 innovations of 2010 that changes human life (courtesy : Time magazine) and CEP systems monitor’s simple events and decisions to identify patterns in real time by combining rules, events and real-time data in the same system to allow organizations to react intelligently to business events.

There are many BI tools available in the market, but still there are missing pieces for collecting and processing data in high efficient way. This is where CEP comes into picture where it can process high end querying and avail real time solutions for day to day business coupled with unrealistic IT issues. For example 70% of the trading done in the US stock market every day depends on streaming data, and much of it uses event processing technology. In the late 90’s the inventors of the relational database were using SQL linked from multiple set of databases to build CEP engine. This seems to be simple thing, but was very complex to implement. After ten years on and driven by pioneers in financial services, event processing currently process quadrillions of dollars a year on electronic Wall Street. This is where CEP has been proving to be one of the fine edged concepts in this dynamic IT revolution.

Posted by Anand Manoharan at 6:03 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Today Cloud has moved on from just another though leadership discussion to a possible strategy for delivering business value. However the trick out here is to think beyond infrastructure and focus on PaaS (Platform as a service). Composite Application Platform (CAP) on cloud is an option which is gaining ground at a tremendous pace and more and more organizations are considering it as a sandbox for innovation. And this is where we will see cloud changing from a cost lever to a value differentiating lever. 

However before diving into details let us look at some of the difficulties today's IT are facing which is Impeding Innovation and agility

• Heavy upfront setup cost impacting project ROI - Today organization goes through an entire lifecycle of product selection and up front license cost, making it difficult for a single project justify its ROI. The issue being the business value delivered by the project cannot offset the heavy upfront license cost or cost of hardware
  
• Implement ERP / Enterprise Application and then look at surround capability - Today organizations are either going through process standardization through ERP implementation or going through the stabilization phase after ERP rollout. Now the issues organizations are facing are
• How much to customize the ERP to take care of specific surround processes which are not core to ERP
• Or How to automate certain manual process that exists around ERP such as Master Data setup which are impacting value delivered by ERP implementation

 

I believe a Composite Application Platform delivered on Cloud can address most of these issues and help IT to collaborate with business to innovate. Here are some of the scenarios

• A FMCG organization has gone through an ERP implementation for its supply chaing and has MDM implemented as part of it. However there is a manual process involved in setting up product in Master Data and surrounding application cutting across departments before it can launch a new product. Here instead of going through a complete product selection and implementation a process automation solution on premise, organization can utilize an CAP on cloud to deliver the solution, which can be extended internally and externally to have both internal and external stakeholders involved
• A TELCO customer have technician working on the field with varied capability and interacting directly with customer, where there was a need to implement a work force management solution which would provide optimized utilization of workforce, fast and efficient customer servicing, increase productivity of work force and escalation management. Here is a perfect example where work force management solution delivered over CAP on cloud could have far reaching impact for its internal and external stake holders

There are more such examples where these solutions can be delivered quickly and effectively. Leaving aside the value it can deliver by automating low value business processes with minimal cost which otherwise have a nuisance value in the organization.

However today the biggest concern on cloud remains around security, availability and features to support such innovation. But the offering coming from some of the vendors is really making it possible with features like

• Process definition and runtime capability on cloud
• Strong UI capability to build stand alone business application
• Strong focus on data
• Secured infrastructure supporting SAS70 compliance, physical security, data security at rest and at flight
• Network perimeter security
• Robust scalability and availability support
• Lastly interoperability between on-premise and off-premise deployment

With these offering becoming a reality, I feel CAP on cloud has become a reality and it is ready for adoption.

Posted by Manas Kumar Sarkar at 11:34 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Working on EAI for half a decade, now the question that comes to my mind is - What is the GLUE between Business and EAI. As IT buzz words, EAI is just another Technology BUZZ word for Business . I believe we as EAI experts have done little to translate Technology to Business Benefits.

Hence for me Business Benefits are the GLUE between EAI and Business. I am sure as a reader, there is sarcastic smile on your face expressing as if a hard nut has been cracked. Everyone knows Business Benefits are GLUE between IT and Business, what's the big Deal? The deal is it's always been easy for me to define Business Benefits for Applications like CRM, Order Management etc etc. How do you define for EAI which is so back end?
Well I asked my friends and the unanimous answer is BAM (Business Activity Monitoring) . In my humble opinion BAM is the enabler to tracking but its still technology word and nothing that Business Understands or are yet to understand.
Talking of Basics of different types of EAI, they are
1- Data Integration
2- Application Integration
3- Process Integration
Technically that's the definition but Integration is always involved in some Process and hence as EAI Implementers, we need to associate each Integration type to the Business Process we are involved in. It's very similar to the motivation Mantra that always give the workers a BIG Picture e:g If workers working for TAJ MAHAL construction had known , they are building one of Seven Wonders, the motivation levels would have been higher. Similarly once we know how it will be used in Business, all the EAI experts will be able to visualize more than Data and Application Integration.
Keeping that thought also in mind, I have always struggled to define EAI Business benefits during the Implementation but have been better off defining during the support process. Some of the Parameters for Deriving the Business Benefits during support are SLA Improvement, Performance Improvement,  System Availability Improvement etc. Key Questions to be answered
1- Is BPM the BRAND name for GLUE considering all EAI Vendors are steeping into that?
2- Do we really have to wait till Support to really define Business Benefits??
Shoot  for your comments and thoughts on your Derivation of Business Benefits during Implementations.

Posted by Girish Kukreja at 3:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)