BPM-EAI

Lets look at some typical cases that can be classified as an analogy to “Fire alarm” encountered in course of a software implementation.

Case 1:

A large programme in North American Energy corporate is scheduled to go-live phase-wise deploying 70 services connecting 15 applications and functionally connecting 8 business lines as part of a business optimization exercise. While sanity testing a App server hosting a new application connecting most of these interfaces in the 4th weekend of the schedule 7 weekends, it is observed that the application is not getting connected due to random errors. (Authentication failure, Null pointer exception, memory unbounded, etc.). None of these errors are reproducible in any of the Pre production environments. On top of it the senior management is hours away from a decision checkpoint meeting and this issue impacts the plan for the scheduled go-live. Dial 911

Case 2:

A business transformation programme is envisaged by a unit of large bank in UK to automate the trading platform use BPM technology for the overall Trade-Accounting-Settlement. An RFP is floated and System Integration service providers provide their best estimates to get the deal. A certain vendor beats all its competitors on the cost front and grabs the deal on a fixed price quote. After the start of engagement, the company as well as the vendor realize that they had drastically underestimated and are in a serious risk of missing the delivery schedule. They estimated for only one BPM flow (it is a single business process but missed the deeper flows and complexity as will as integration with multiple applications and systems). Dial 999.

Case 3:

A financial institution embarks on improving their existing risk management process and predictability to support the main business processes. The leadership envisions better productivity of their business resources and lesser risk deals. This is laid out to IT leadership and enterprise architects who come up with an overall process for a certain cost and timeline. The details are percolated down in the Organization pyramid and ball gets rolled on the project. The project is delivered as well with minor glitches after following a requirements-design-development-test-deliver cycle. But the business users find seldom use of this improvement and infact see that it is more slower and providing incorrect values thus failing in providing the risk management cover that it was meant for. They now want to roll back to their previous solution. Dial…

Case 4:

One application maintenance team had put in a major release in production couple of months back upgrading the existing services and so far there has not been any cause of concern. But in a matter of few days, unexpected issues such as frequent crashing of services, delay in bringing up the applications causing serious disruption to the overall business. Under stress since all dependent applications and senior management are closely tracking this, the support team tries to attack the symptoms, tries failover to disaster centers, attempts a clean shutdown and start and still find that the issues are getting regenerated again and again on a daily basis. Putting in more hours of work is not resulting in any peace of mind…

Taking a pause here and will come back more on this…

Posted by Narayanan Chathanur at 11:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Social BPM involves allowing the business partners access to the core functions in an operating model that's collaborative instead of transactional. The general concept is that managing business process in the classical way, meaning transactionally and within the boundaries of the Enterprise can be greatly improved by making the relationship less structured, more participatory, and created around an open community model. In such a model, the business partners are participants in the actual process rather than being consumers or providers to the process. In such a solution, all teams have access to the most up to date information as well as visibility of the process status thus leading to efficient decision cycles and pro-active issue management as opposed to reactive fire-fighting. 

Posted by Maloy Patnaik at 8:02 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

IBM integrated their WebSphere BPM offerings and released a new product - IBM Business Process Manager (BPM) 7.5 late last week. Here I was sitting with one of my BPM clients at lunch table earlier this week and while browsing through the lunch menu, my client suddenly asked - What is this new product from IBM for business process management? Will I have to migrate to new BPM and how will my existing entitlements change post this upgrade?

The thing that surprised me most was how good the 'big blue' is in communicating to its customers. The product is just released and customers are curious to know what it means to them. I told Mike, IBM Business Process Manager (BPM) 7.5 is the successor to WebSphere Process Server (WPS), WebSphere Lombardi Edition (WLE) and other WebSphere BPM family products. 

Knowing IBM, Mike they will continue to support its existing products for specific time period but eventually you will have to migrate to IBM BPM. Please pass me that paper napkin and let me explain the new product offering before talking about what you may be entitled to. The new IBM BPM 7.5 has the following components:

1. BPMN Process Designer 
2. BPEL Integration Designer, 
3. A common repository 
4. A process server that includes both the BPMN and BPEL engines
5. Process Center - This is a new web based component which along with common repository and process governance allows users to reuse artifacts from process or integration designer.
6. ILOG rules engine - Is a limited functionally. Interestingly can only be called from processes and not by external applications
7. Monitoring tools and UI options with both the process portal and the Business Space (IBM's composite application development tool)

Is currently available in three configurations:

• The Express edition - Is for starter BPM projects, it offers full functionality of the Process Designer to build and run BPMN processes but only one server with no clustering.
• The Standard edition - For multi BPM projects with more human centric involvement and lightweight integration functionality. I would think, it offers functionality similar to that available as part of former WebSphere Lombardi Edition  
• The Advanced edition - Is bundle of all 7 components (mentioned above).

Posted by Vaneet Arora at 4:50 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

One of the three principle tenets of the Cloud Computing paradigm is On Demand Elasticity (the other two are Pay Per Use and Virtualization). What this basically refers to is the ability of the Cloud system to provision additional computing power and storage space to meet the demands of the resource hungry enterprise. With increasing globalization, business integration and consolidation, business critical processes are extremely sensitive to data server scalability, reliability, security and availability. The System z platform and DB2 for z/OS have continually set the "gold standard" by which other system implementations are measured. However, one of the key bottlenecks of this system is the underlying server system which may not be able to scale up to the meet the requirements. One of the three principle tenets of the Cloud Computing paradigm is On Demand Elasticity (the other two are Pay Per Use and Virtualization). What this basically refers to is the ability of the Cloud system to provision additional computing power and storage space to meet the demands of the resource hungry enterprise. With increasing globalization, business integration and consolidation, business critical processes are extremely sensitive to data server scalability, reliability, security and availability. The System z platform and DB2 for z/OS have continually set the "gold standard" by which other system implementations are measured. However, one of the key bottlenecks of this system is the underlying server system which may not be able to scale up to the meet the requirements. 

Posted by Maloy Patnaik at 4:46 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Guest Post by Kapil Nanchahal, Associate Practice Engagement Manager with the Infosys BPM EAI practice. He has over 11 years of experience in consulting and implementation of package software, specifically middleware products. His focus areas include setup of CoEs, solution space definition, creating strategy and roadmaps and engagement management for middleware implementations specifically dealing with BPM.

We are at the end of day 1 of PegaWORLD 2011 now. As expected, Customer Centricity was at the core of the messages being delivered across all Pega sessions. Hence, it was not surprising that Alan Trefler opened the keynote address identifying Customer Service and Loyalty as the most important goal for Pega solutions.

The keynote sessions were interspersed with the regular highlights of fast growth, leadership positioning by Gartner and Forrester, a 1600 strong attendee list making it the largest BPM-focused event. But that’s not what makes Pegaworld or Pega stand out from other players in the BPM space. To me the differentiator for Pega is the thought leadership they bring to the space. Let me point to a few instances from the keynote sessions:

• The approach of ‘Tying together’ rules and process elements of BPM seems to be more prudent rather than ‘gluing’ together varied and sometimes incoherent components. A scenario well illustrated with an image of Frankenstein representing a ‘gluing of dead companies’.

• Innovation is an intersection of Invention — the ability to ideate and the ability to deliver or execute the idea pragmatically

• The concept of Customer Oriented Architecture (COA - we never seem to fall short of new acronymns, do we?!) with its three pillars of Cross Channel interaction, Cross-silo processes and the focus on immediacy

• Case Management shouldn’t be seen as file labeling alone, that is, collation of related attributes into a single file; it should focus on ‘Case Automation’ in order to achieve its true objective

• The focus of workflow should actually be ‘work do’ rather than just routing the work

On the other hand one could have expected a more stand-out theme, a new statement that is strikingly different from the messages Pega has propagated in the past. That is something I found missing and would certainly hope that it is accommodated by the time we are in Dallas for Pegaworld 2012. But that’s still some way to go.

On the product front there were some key announcements about PRPC 6.2 like removal of dependency on Visio for modelling, reusable UI controls, dynamic user experience screens, enhancements to case management, incorporation of business events and predictive analytics into the suite. While some of them like reusable controls sound very ‘2001-ish’ it is refreshing to see events and predictive analytics making it to the product. While most mature products boast of similar feature set, it is the combination of these with the existing rules and process capabilities that Pega can look to use as a differentiator. It was also good to hear from Allen that Chordiant is not just integrated but ‘unified’ with the rest of the package. While the year to come will validate the extent of this unification, that I am sure ranks high on Pega’s priority, else they themselves stand the risk of being labelled as a company that glues disparate BPM components!

The afternoon had a well articulated session from Christine Gendron and Julie Aldrich of MassMutual that talked about the Customer Experience program at MassMutual, and how the ‘Build for Change’ platform was used for an agile BPM implementation. The Business Technology participation that we often yearn for in IT projects was very much at display here and so was the team’s passion for agile development methodology. Change management, being a core component of agile implementations, was highlighted quite well in the session. Particularly interesting was the way of articulating how the flow from Strategy -> Direction -> Definition was correspondingly accomplished by Program Leadership -> Vision Framework Team -> Tech Governance Team -> Feature Development Team.

Another session that caught the audience’s attention was from Clarisa Stollenwerck of Carnival Cruise Lines. For one, it was good to see a non-insurance and banking client talk about early success, something that I anticipated in my blog yesterday. The highlight of the Pega solution here was the way ‘a customer case is shipped’ onboard, when the ship is ashore, just like the rest of the baggage. Pega team and Clarisa explained how the relevant case data is transferred to the ship, so that the Pega application onboard can provide the same customer experience that a ground inquiry would receive, without going through a satellite link. I can certainly see application of this architecture in field services and mobile applications that remain disconnected for a long time.

The Infosys participation at the event has been good overall. There was a fruitful meeting with Alan Trefler and team, discussing about areas of partnership and enablement.

I am keen to see if day 2 has any strikingly different messages. I don’t suspect it would, at this point. But the schedule is certainly packed with some very interesting sessions and meetings. I am hoping to post my take on the sessions, before we end the day. Until then, I look forward to your comments, queries online or in our booth, if you happen to be there.

Posted by Arun Ravindran at 11:03 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Guest Post by Kapil Nanchahal, Associate Practice Engagement Manager with the Infosys BPM EAI practice. He has over 11 years of experience in consulting and implementation of package software, specifically middleware products. His focus areas include setup of CoEs, solution space definition, creating strategy and roadmaps and engagement management for middleware implementations specifically dealing with BPM.

I am on my way to Pegaworld 2011, the annual customer event for Pegasystems - a leading BPM vendor and an Infosys partner. PegaWORLD is one of the most anticipated annual confluence of BPM users, experts and service providers alike. Infosys is a Diamond sponsor at this event (Booth no: 1).

The agenda of the event looks evenly spread across industry verticals. This is quite in line with Pega’s current focus on expanding presence beyond their traditional industry strongholds - Insurance and Finance. It would be interesting to see how Pega applied these learnings to their forays into Retail, Manufacturing, Telecom and other verticals.

In terms of key takeaways (not the booth giveaways!) from the event, clients new to Pega & BPM should target for:

• Understanding a comprehensive view of BPM as a complete business problem solving package, rather than a workflow engine that most new adopters consider it to be

• Understanding how BPM initiatives in your organization might need ‘special handling’ from a process, business collaboration and development methodology point of view

• Looking for instances of true business value realization over a short period of time, something most of us in the industry grapple with and are often skeptical about

As someone who has been part of the BPM implementations over the last few years, I would look for:

• Key success stories from the emerging verticals and learnings from large Pega implementations

• The Chordiant acquisition that occurred close to PegaWORLD 2010, is over an year old now. It would be good to understand the strategy, initial successes and an update on how the Chordiant suite enhances the capabilities of PRPC and the industry frameworks today.

• How successes of customer experience and relationship-related frameworks (CPM and family) would be replicated to very relevant domains like Utilities, Telecom and other service based industries

• “Building Tomorrow’s Enterprise” for our clients is Infosys’ focus right now and I would look for more and more instances of how Pega’s “Build For Change” platform has become a powerful catalyst for enabling such transformations.

This will also be the largest Infosys presence and showcase at Pegaworld since our partnership began a few years ago. On the 7th June, Infosys hosts a session on - ‘Powering Agility for Retailers and Manufacturers through Innovative Solutions’, where we talk about our experiences and specific instances of the approach taken, with examples like the Warranty Management solution or the Dynamic Pricing solution for retailers. The Infosys team also hosts an Insurance dinner on June 7th and that should be a wonderful opportunity to interact with Insurance customers and catch-up with quite a few friends.

I plan to post daily updates on the event and look forward to interacting with some of you in person

Posted by Arun Ravindran at 7:48 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)