BPM-EAI

There is one objective for IT operations - reduce the existing operations cost and ensure a good sense of predictability on discretionary spending towards growth and scalability. All the initiatives whether it be SAAS, Public Cloud, Private Cloud, Virtualization are all aimed towards the same basic objectives. But enterprises still clamor for the right fit, fail in many of the initiatives and reducing the cost becomes a challenge. The IT vehicle hits the brakes on the road towards its supposed destination
It seems as if Cloud solutions could provide the mix of reducing the cost as well as provide tools and accelerators for new development. Sometimes it becomes a risk when the information transacted is part of the cloud and not “in” the Enterprise Infrastructure.
Some questions posed to the IT leaders are whether and when to go for cloud? Next is what all should go in the cloud? Should one have multiple clouds or single cloud? Should you have a mix of Private and Public clouds? and so on…
The theme of this write up is whether the “Enterprise Integration Services” could serve as the tipping point for the cloud and pave the way for exponential growth in usage of Cloud across the enterprise technologies.

As mentioned in an earlier blog, just like a human being all enterprises are unique and they should not copy or get sold with an idea from a product vendor or a SI provider. Almost all enterprises have a multitude of applications such as SAP, Oracle databases, IBM Mainframes and integration technologies such as TIBCO, PEGA, Software AG serving the business needs. Most of these vendors also have their “Cloud Solutions” for their respective suite of products. Does it make sense for enterprises to go for a cloud solution for each of them or some of them? - As usual there is no one clear cut solution.

Consider a sample enterprise with a Production class having:

a. An SAP system for Back Office and Accounting Settlements.
b. 10 shared Oracle database servers supporting a wide variety of operations.
c. A Mainframe instance with having multiple modules of legacy calculations.
d. App Servers such as Weblogic, Websphere to support the UIs within the enterprise as well as customer oriented websites.
e. A BPM platform comprising of key business processes.
f. A tiered SOA layer comprising 100s of services that integrates between these applications and business processes.
g. Other ERP Systems for different functions such as CRM, SCM, HRM.

Putting monolithic systems like SAP, Individual ERP softwares, Oracle database in clouds is comparatively easier because of less customizations around such systems. But it will not save the bulk of the cost incurred by an enterprise. It is probably better off to keep them within or create a private cloud concept around the systems such as in SLAs for software life cycle. The objective is to faster time to market and reduction of overhead cost.
Glancing through the BPM and SOA components of the Architecture where it is all in house created services using either standard tools such as IBM, TIBCO, PEGA, Software AG and even .NET or Java based web services one needs to understand the depth and breath of such systems. Typically such software systems are like the virtual nervous system transmitting messages from one system to another in the body of the enterprise. Putting them in cloud is like getting the nervous system out of the body. Will it first of all work?
At the same time, it will also be the right candidate for any organization who is pursuing Cloud and wants to keep only the brain as part of the organization but all other parts outside of it.

In building Tomorrow’s Enterprise, organizations looking out for transformation in Information Technology should well think about first whether in-house mechanisms exist to get the same benefits as one gets with Cloud. Most of the time they will do and if there is a valid case to go for cloud, then integration services could well serve as the tipping point for enterprises to migrate towards a Cloud based Organization.

Posted by Narayanan Chathanur at 8:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

In our last part, we were discussing the Social BPM Adoption Model, and we saw how collaborative process design is an integral part of the model. The next evolutionary step is to extend collaboration from process design to process execution through runtime participation. In this stage, though the process participants are fixed as in any conventional BPM solution, they are enabled with social tools that help them in better collaboration. These social tools are integrated into the BPMS landscape and can provide features like chat, VOIP enabled calls, commenting on tasks, providing ratings, voting mechanisms etc.

A significant upgrade to run-time participation is enabling social collaboration by routing tasks in the process execution to process participants who were not envisaged to be a part of that process during deployment time. These tasks can be executed by participants in the social media and the process continues taking those inputs.

Extending existing BPM Solutions with Social Features

The Social BPM approach is oriented towards providing a method for process designing and deployment extended with Social interaction features. This essentially calls for extensions to the traditional BPM solution. The objective of process design is to produce two kinds of models viz. Social BPMN model (BPMN + social interaction features) and an Application model.

The Application model describes how the application behaves independently of the deployment platform. It is mostly used for high level verification of application features, prototyping and can also be used to generate application code. The social extensions for BPM User Interface includes design for collaboration as compared to task oriented User Interfaces. This includes UI components / widgets to facilitate chatting, sharing common spaces, enabling community interaction both internal as well as outside the corporate firewall, voting, rating etc.

The process frameworks and templates that are now typically restricted to packaging business rules, reports and workflows by specific industry domain or process would get extended to include components to enable social interaction. Accordingly the current availability of connectors, adaptors and services that are restricted to enterprise systems (like SAP, Oracle etc.) would be extended to include communities and social sites (connector for Facebook, Twitter etc.). Crawlers on the social community would provide valuable intelligence to enhance business processes.

Monitoring and Process Analysis would get enlarged in scope to cover social process monitoring and provide inputs to optimize business processes. This also provides a base for Social Intelligence

For those interested, you can find my detailed paper on how Social process design, execution and Social Intelligence can enhance Customer experience @ http://www.infosys.com/BPM-EAI/resource-center/Documents/social-design-execution-intelligence.pdf

Posted by Shankar Krishnamurthy at 10:12 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I was making a presentation to a CIO of a large bank headquartered in Netherlands on the need to have an evolving strategy around BPM as several enterprise spaces are morphing into one another and the space is constantly shape shifting. It was during that time that I realized the strong connect and the peer pressure that exists among the CXO community in Netherlands. The CIO of the bank was intently looking at "extending" their existing BPM solutions by incorporate social features because he came to know from one of the CIO of a competing bank that they had just then kick-started a similar program. I was happy because all we were hearing till then on Social BPM were from the analysts without significant corroboration from our clients on the ground. This set me thinking. I believe we are currently witnessing trigger events for an extensive social play in the BPM space. I wanted to share my perspective on the need for an evolving Social BPM adoption model and how various components of traditional BPM solution can be extended to incorporate social interaction features.

Social BPM Adoption Model

Social features can be introduced at multiple levels while designing BPM solutions. It is pertinent to note that not all business processes would be "socially amenable" and the need for providing social features to BPM solutions must be driven by the overall process requirement.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

At the lowest level, we have the conventional BPM solutions that are built top-down and are model based process execution solutions. They are characterised by rigid task allocation to different process participants with communication among process participants being restricted to task allocation and outcome communication and often facilitating Straight-Through-Processing with almost no communication between process participants. Tasks in the process are defined within boundaries, process participants are known before hand and pre-registered and workflows happen based on well-defined logic and escalation rules. The communication among different process participants are governed and controlled by user interfaces (either inbuilt within the BPM suite or on a separate UI layer), with outcomes, tasks and exceptions being communicated via email or task inboxes. Majority of the BPM solutions that are implemented today fall under this category.
The next step in Social BPM evolution is to enable collaborative process design. This throws open process design to multiple people who can collectively design business processes. BPM vendors like SoftwareAG (ARISalign) and Metastorm (M3) have come out with a collaborative platform for process design in the recent past. Collaborative process modeling provides a compelling value proposition if the BPM teams are geographically dispersed. This is the starting point for Social BPM in most cases.
The next evolutionary step is to extend collaboration from process design to process execution through runtime participation. In our next part, we will look into how existing BPM solutions can be extended with social features.

Posted by Shankar Krishnamurthy at 12:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)