BPM-EAI

“Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn’t.” said Mark Twain. In our day to day lives, we come across many truths which we blissfully ignore and take it as a matter of fact. Gravity is one such “truth”, while many a pseudo truths have been falsified as stated by Nicolas Taleb in “Black Swan”; Sir Karl Pooper went on to say about scientific truth are of two types, first type - which is falsified and the other type - waiting to be falsified.

Notwithstanding the debate about the truth and absolute truth, there are certain aspects which remain true even after many centuries or many ages that have passed by. “Gravity” and “Division by Zero” are two prominent examples that come to our minds when we think of Universal Truth. The most modern technologies, when applied cannot falsify these truths. May be a human/animal can feel a sense of Zero-Gravity for a moment or a few, but again they are subjected to the ever present reality.

Continue reading "ICC: Standing the test of time" »

Posted by Anil Prasad Kurnool at 9:46 AM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

A football coach when he joins a school, primary if you may want to call it, has a herculean task of training the kids for the real game. Kids know that the ball needs to be kicked into a goal and more often than not, in their enthusiasm of game, kick the ball into their own goal; defeating the very purpose of match. There might be “dares” too, as to who would dribble the ball for most part of the game - which in effect stops the ball being passed on to an untagged player near to the opponent goal, missing out on an opportunity to win.

Continue reading "SOA Evangelist" »

Posted by Anil Prasad Kurnool at 5:58 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Continue reading "Infosys Team at TUCON 2011 - Annual TIBCO user conference" »

Posted by Kapil Nanchahal at 1:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

This write up is a continuation from the blog titled 911. When these different cases are dealt with, they are pseudo named as “fire-fighting” even in technology world because they are fires trying to engulf the IT infrastructure and if not stopped will burn up a lot of $$$. The operations cost of IT today range between 50% to 75% of the overall IT budget and to reduce this cost overhead and optimize IT resources, it is important that many such sporadic issues and cases are not masked with tactical solutions and allow the ‘fires’ to turn up again and again. The loses due to such issues are not directly accounted but surely affects.
In the world we live, any fires that occurs at a home or an industry is dealt by Fire fighting department and they don’t stop by just stopping the fire, they investigate till they find the root cause and advises steps to ensure it doesn’t happen again.

Continue reading "Enterprise Fire Fighting Cell" »

Posted by Narayanan Chathanur at 9:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

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

Continue reading "911" »

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

Exception Handling, Error Handling, Fault Handling are different synonyms for the same concept. It’s relevance never decreased with increased usage of technology. It is probably the most necessary thing in any branch of IT in a parallel stream and can create problems if not conceptualized properly.
In another context in the branch of ‘electronics engineering’ Noise is considered a factor in amplification calculations (it is a necessary evil!) since if it becomes ‘0’, the signal strength will be infinity which is out of control and non desirable.
Similarly, Exception Handling is something which only increases the stability of any implementation. There is no doubt that errors cannot be done away with. They just need to be handled properly.

To define it simply as mathematical theorem:

S ∝ E where S stands for measure of Stability and E for robustness in Exception Handling (As E increases, S improves substantially).

Continue reading "Exception Handling - what a cliché?" »

Posted by Narayanan Chathanur at 6:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

There is always something to learn when nature creates ruckus such as the recent Japan earthquake plus tsunami cascading its effect on radiation leak but through man-made nuclear reactors. Most of the organizations create Disaster recovery (DR) processes and DR data centers to ensure that the businesses work as usual or with minimum downtime. Most of the IT platform kicks up activity in DR center if the main Infrastructure data center gets affected by similar disasters though even on very lesser scale such as a simple case of power failure.

A simple question is what is the effective way to plan and create strategy for DRs and high availability? There are some traditional but effective thoughts to it.

Continue reading "Disaster Recovery and High Availability" »

Posted by Narayanan Chathanur at 8:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The epic of Narasimha Avatar of Lord Vishnu (The Protector) as mentioned in Bhagavata Purana talks about the reason for Him to take an Avatar. It was about a Demon by name Hiranyakashipu, who undergoes many years of Tapas (Penance) to achieve “Invincibility and Immortality”.

After Lord Bramha (The Creator) come to him asks him to make a Wish, Hiranyakashipu mentions that he does not want defeat in any form and death never to meet him neither in day nor at night, neither by animal nor by man, neither indoors not outdoors, neither by a living thing nor by a nonliving thing, neither in sky nor on earth, so on and so forth, which he feels would safeguard him at all the times.

However, Lord Vishnu (The Protector) takes the avatar of Narasimha and kills the demon after finding loop holes in the “Wish” he has asked for. The avatar does the following: a half-man-half-lion (satisfying neither man nor animal), in twilight (neither day nor night), sitting on the threshold of courtyard (neither indoor, not outdoor), on his thighs (neither in sky nor on earth), with sharp finger nails disemboweling him (neither by living nor nonliving thing), there by killing him.

Editor’s note: For brevity’s sake the story is cut short into two paragraphs, however interested readers are suggested to check out various sites providing the detailed epic on Internet.

The above epic showcases the triumph of Good over Evil. But, the reference to this epic in this blog is not about Gods, Demons and their epics, but about something else.

Continue reading "The Art of Requirement Gathering" »

Posted by Anil Prasad Kurnool at 12:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (9) | TrackBacks (0)

This reminds me of never-ending vegetarian versus non-vegetarian debate, it always either ends up in both parties agreeing to disagree and take their own way or one party forcing down their way on the other if they have the strength to do so...

Some of you might believe that it is no different in the enterprises when it comes to debating centralized shared service model in a set up that is enjoying the federated delivery models. In real-life experience, I found that its not so much of the technicality of the matter that really makes the argument go anywhere closer to decision (leaving aside the few cases where CIO level interventions have made their way). Instead there are other ways that led to enterprise adopt the shared services way without wasting too much time debating about this whole matter...

Continue reading "Winning the shared service battle against forces of federated structure..." »

Posted by Rakesh Mishra at 5:59 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I'm not very fond of putting ‘ change management’ in my title. It’s such a cliché and not sure if organizations really trust something like this even though everyone understands what this is about. But life is not fair, not to the extent we all like and world of Integration is even more unfair (ask your Integration lead and they will tell you the stories). Just couple of months back, I was having very intense discussion with a CIO of one of the major retail businesses on the topic of IT shared services, and issue on hand was the frustration that this gentleman was going through because of not being able to generate interest and motivation in larger IT organization community as well as business units to go shared service way. While on his interest part, his direct career and credibility as a leader was at stake, more importantly, it nullified lot of effort and investment that was made to conceptualize, design and build the shared service entity.

And this has not been the only unique or isolated story that I have come across. Specially with rapidly changing and evolving IT organizations, this has been a common struggle to break the current mindset and conventional working patterns and move the entire organization toward a new way of doing things. It typically will involve the business app teams, infrastructure team, business owners and managers, vendors and all other parts of the eco-system that are involved in making service delivery work.

Continue reading "Struggling with adoption of Shared Integration Services in your organization? Welcome to 'Change Management'" »

Posted by Rakesh Mishra at 10:11 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

So one has heard about Integration Competency Center (ICC), read analyst briefs on it and understood another three letter acronym. But the questions still lingers in the back of the mind “How do I figure out if we need an ICC”? “We are already doing integration projects and doing Ok, so how do I sell this idea internally” OR “We know things are not working well for us in integration projects and there are issues, but where do we make a start?”. If you empathize with this situation (and it is a common one based on what we hear from our prospects), read on. In this blog series, I will share my thoughts on challenges and approaches when it comes to handling the most critical phase in your ICC journey ‘Getting started with it”. This phase will mostly involve envisioning, business case creation, internal selling, evangelization and roadmap development. 

Continue reading "Getting Started with an Integration Competency Center (ICC) – Part 1" »

Posted by Kapil Mishra at 12:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Continue reading "What's next for Integration Competency Centers - Part 6" »

Posted by Rakesh Mishra at 2:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

 B2B or the collaborative business partnership is transforming. Most of it can be attributed to great deal of opportunities emerging owing to new business models and economic influences. So B2B as a space in the enterprise business eco-system is becoming the convergence point for Business and IT to jointly create best business value in the global market place.

This transformation (that is going on and will continue in the future) is what this blogging series is going to be focused on. And to make it little more interesting, I’m adding slight complexity here, bring ‘value’ perspective as the core. So net net, we will look into a structure thought process for creating value in B2B space as the transformation is taking place. I believe it will be of great help to senior executives of enterprises that are charged with the responsibility of taking their B2B capability to next level.

Continue reading "Business Value Innovation in B2B space - Part 1" »

Posted by Rakesh Mishra at 4:33 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Continue reading ""What's Next" for Integration Competency Centers? - Part 5" »

Posted by Rakesh Mishra at 5:13 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Few weeks back, business card of one of my clients caught my attention – the designation read as Chief Integration Officer ("CIO")! This goes on to demonstrate that integration platforms of enterprises have started seeing the need for dedicated attention from a CXO designate. Incidentally, two weeks later, during my panel discussion at "Connection 2009", similar view points were echoed by my fellow panel members - Ken Vollmer (of Forrester), Mark Zrna (of Orica) and Lowell Gilvin (of Jabil Circuit). The panel, moderated by Chris Johnson from Sterling Commerce, agreed that integration platform has taken a role of paramount importance in companies and has is no longer seen as just another ‘infrastructure’ element; this sentiment reflects analysts’ opinion that integration has catapulted into top-5 priorities of CIOs. This has led to evolution of a special role of “Chief Integration Officer” who is now responsible and accountable for the integration strategy in the enterprise.

Continue reading "Emergence of the new CIO" »

Posted by Abhishek at 11:35 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Continue reading "Consolidating Integration – mandatory or optional?" »

Posted by Madhu Pulasseri at 5:48 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

I believe, in the next-generation view of the ICC, a key area of focus will be  'adoption of lean methods to reduce eco-system fat'.  Let me talk about this ‘eco-system fat’. This is just a terminology that I use to represent the ‘undesired’ elements in the ecosystem of people, processes and technology fabric, similar to ‘undesired’ fat in our body. So even though organizations might have an ICC already in place and operating (in whatever capacity), over period of time processes tend to become difficult and ineffective, people seem to be getting stuck in a pattern of activities and hence become difficult to change etc etc. At the same time, context of what ICC does for the organization changes over period of time, need of the organization changes, environment changes. While all of that changes, things in ICC typically do not change in the same proportion and pace and hence what happens here that a layer of fat starts growing on various capabilities of the organization. By capabilities, I mean processes, knowledge, operations, contribution from staff, technology performance etc. Over a period of time, this fat makes the entire organizational system of the ICC  slower and less effective (in terms of delivering results) which basically means burning lot of dollars to improve anything in the eco-system.

With the current acute economical cost pressures, a shared system like ICC will need to reduce this fat significantly. One of the most successful ways to reduce this fat, (or better called non-performing elements of the ecosystem) is to adopt lean methods.

Continue reading ""What's next" for Integration Competency Centers? - Part 4" »

Posted by Rakesh Mishra at 7:17 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Continue reading "BPM and application eco-system based integration platforms" »

Posted by Rakesh Mishra at 11:49 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Next in the next-generation strategy kit is: “High degree of collaboration of the ICC across stakeholders that allows more transparency in the engagement and leads to co-creation of methods of delivery/operation of ICC with stakeholders”.

Basic premise for this view-point is the evolution of the working model for ICC. A typical model for shared services has ‘close door’ system or ‘black box’ system. It means that for rest of the organization, this shared services engagement is only for the delivery of service outcomes. For rest, ICC manages internally. It worked fine during early phase of the evolution of this system since it brought relief to other dependent parties from headache of managing variety of matters; now they could just focus on the outcomes from this shared service. But today, this black box is limiting the overall capability of the organization to innovate and improve

Continue reading ""What's next" for integration competency centers? - Part 3" »

Posted by Rakesh Mishra at 11:09 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

In my last blog post of this series, I talked about the next-generation highlights of the ICC. First one in the list says: Next generation competency centers will make it lot easier to execute and manage the changes than how it is today. That will transform the role of 'change' from 'threat' to 'opportunity'.

Reason why I see it coming because I see today ‘ability to change’ to be a major roadblock in the enterprises irrespective of the area we talk about (technology, infrastructure, processes, standards etc.) and irrespective of the nature of the change (consolidate, standardize, migrate, optimize etc.). It means that unless we unlock the secret of managing the change better and make it easier to change, we are going to get poor results in almost all scenario. Let me take a real-life example out of my engagements to help understand this point.

Continue reading ""What's Next" for Integration Competency Centers - Part 2" »

Posted by Rakesh Mishra at 11:37 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Continue reading ""What's Next" for Integration Competency Centers? - Part 1" »

Posted by Rakesh Mishra at 5:02 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Continue reading "Creating Sound and Credible Strategies for your Integration and SOA programs" »

Posted by Rakesh Mishra at 4:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)