Operational Agility

I am feeling quite pleased with myself for managing to get the word thrice into my last post.  Such a fine word don’t you think?

This post comes to you with the word analyst.  A dirty word in some parts of the blogosphere.

I have never paid an industry analyst but I am thinking of doing so.  Not to write some white paper promoting my company’s solutions and position us positively against our competitors.  I can write that free of charge and just as many potential customers will ignore it as if an analyst had written it.

What I actually want to achieve is to look at a wider industry trend.  I want to test whether today’s view of IT architecture is really becoming business process focussed.

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More interesting coverage on alignment of BPM and SOA from Jean-Jacques Dubray got me thinking about what a large undertaking it would be to make such an implementation enterprise wide.

I am not trying to open up the bottom up versus top down argument here, already eloquently covered by Todd Biske.  Rather, I am trying to think of things as central or local.

I like the idea of tools that can implement local solutions to local problems.  Clearly central control is required or the IT infrastructure will run out of control.

However, IT departments are struggling to meet the ever growing number of change requests and have only blunt tools and scarce resources to address them.  So the business users get “wait for the strategic solution” (read between the lines “some months/years away if successful at all”).

Is it possible to provide solutions that are powerful but temporary?  Should these solutions be capable of fitting into a future architecture based around BPM and SOA?  Should business users have the privilege of not having to wait years for strategic solutions but be able to capture key process benefits right now?

Thrice yes in my view.

Interesting piece in the UK Independent today reporting rising Indian wages rising to 75% of the US level (20% only two years ago).  This is good news for Indian developers but bad news for companies who have off-shored purely and only to save cost.  No wonder US companies are finally starting to bring software engineering work back to their shores.

In the UK where IT off-shoring has been prevalent but not quite to the same degree as the US we wait to see if the same trend emerges.

Maybe we are getting to the stage where work will be placed for reasons of skill, geography, culture, convenience, service and team motivation - not just for cost reasons.  Or maybe work will just start transferring to the Far East, Russia, and Africa.  UK and US universities have plenty or representatives from these regions so the skills must be emerging.

Of course, I am referring only to the IT sector.  The Independent reports Indian call centre wages still significantly lower than in the West, although staff turnover is starting to spiral.  Smart companies who have outsourced important customer service operations (to the detriment of customer service), should take note before this turns into another wage spiral and eats up their ROI.

This press release landed in my in-tray this morning.  The basic premise is that enterprises are turning to BPM because the major systems (ERP, CRM etc) have not delivered the required flexibility in business processes.

There is a long held belief in the Build vs Buy debate that you either build and have a system that perfectly (or nearly) matches your business processes, or you buy a packaged application and change your business processes to what should be best practice.

But best practice (at least as determined by the software vendors) has some conceptual problems.  Firstly it assumes that all businesses are the same (they are not!).  Secondly it assumes that business users will accept the new processes (and so will their customers).  Thirdly it broadly ignores the existing IT infrastructure which varies enormously company by company.  Finally, it doesn’t acknowledge the massive amount of necessary change in business processes on an ongoing basis.

I think what we are seeing here is a user rebellion against large “benchmark” systems and the users are trying to address this with their own workarounds, or with BPM or similar.

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Ann All has an interesting piece commenting on David Taber’s views on the use of process improvement techniques such as six sigma.

I think David is absolutely right to suggest that using six sigma too early can stifle innovation and reduce the chance of new product success.

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I really like the idea of bringing the concepts of Web 2.0 into the enterprise.  Giving this the badge of Enterprise 2.0 may be helpful (although most people I know who work on the business side of the enterprise would not understand the term Web 2.0 so maybe it’s only helpful to the IT community).

Anyway, Ross Mayfield has an interesting transcription from the Enterprise 2.0 Conference which leads on collaboration (via wikis, social networks, blogs etc) as the big idea replacing the concept us old hacks might call Knowledge Management (KM).

All the talk I have seen from the conference is about harnessing corporate knowledge and combining the efforts of human beings.  In the Web 2.0 world, collaboration via wikis, blogs, RSS, social networking tools, bookmarking etc, have been great for individuals. But I think the enterprise is more complex than a group of social individuals in control of their own destiny. 

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Following my last post on enterprise mash-ups where I looked at some of the companies integrating enterprise apps to automate business processes, I was thinking a bit more and doing a bit of Googling and came across a few more companies of interest.

You may recall I highlighted Blue Prism, Openspan, Seagull and Jacada as using mashup type integration to automate business processes.

But my traditional view of composite apps was that they were more about data aggregation, a sort of Google Mashup Editor creating a Google Home Page for enterprise data, allowing users (or user roles) to access and manipulate a personalised set of data sources relevant to the needs of their job.

Weaving in my last post on IBM’s view of the links between SOA and BPM where the business side of the enterprise is seen as people, processes and information, perhaps the different types of mashup tools are defined by how they link those three elements.  So if Blue Prism et al primarily extract data and turn this into information to execute business processes without human intervention, here are a few companies that seem to be good at turning data into information for human beings via the UI.

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According to Wikipedia, Jeux Sans Frontières was a game devised by Général Charles de Gaulle to encourage better relations between French and German youths.  In the 1960s there was still presumably a slight legacy of post-war frostiness between the occupier and the occupied country but at the same time a renewed optimism about European Union having signed the Treaty of Rome in 1957,

Following the Enterprise Software wars of the 1990’s and 2000’s a frostiness and lack of understanding developed between the Business and IT.  So in the post war optimism of the Software Optimised for Agreement (SOA) era, can IBM help repair the damage with their new Innov8 game?

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No matter what type of change you are responsible for in your organisation, business processes, training, IT, M & A, R & D, HR, you will have seen a big bang project go wrong.  The most spectacular ones are always IT of course and, as an ex-IT Project Manager, I have to own up to a couple of dropped ones…

I have long thought that big bang projects are inappropriate for the enterprise.  They always end up costing more than planned, delivering less than planned, and causing more disruption than planned.  They also take so long to deliver that there is a very serious risk that by the time they are implemented, the results are no longer relevant or useful.

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Last year Blue Prism sponsored some research into off-shoring business processes, front office processes - contact centres.

The shocking (not) conclusion was that Young People Don’t Trust Offshoring.

It’s very clear that customers do not like off-shored services so why do it?

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