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I’ve just read an interesting opinion piece in British Computing mag by Martin Butler.

He contends that the IT industry has “lost sight of its primary goal of reducing information management costs” and allowed IT estates to become way too complex.

I agree and I know countless operational people, the customers of IT, who are exasperated not only at the complexity of their IT, but perhaps more importantly the amount of time and money it now takes to make even the simplest of changes.

Martin’s anecdotal evidence of people resorting to spreadsheet management, or “passing around bits of paper” is depressing and as he points out, not the answer.

The reason I am interested in this subject is that Blue Prism is pioneering a new concept in computing aimed at simplifying corporate IT and the way it is interpreted and used by the business.

Freeing the business operation to fulfil its own integration and automation needs, and start hammering the growing IT change list is one thing.  But doing that with workarounds like spreadsheets or bits of paper or hiring temporary staff is ungoverned, insecure and not exactly scalable.  Blue Prism proposes an IT supported software platform, supported by a thorough methodology that business users can work within to make sense of the complexity, improve service, manage ongoing change, and above all reduce costs.

We call this an Operational Agility Platform, but the idea of operational agility is far from limited to Blue Prism.  As Martin suggests, there is evidence of a movement emerging “a revolt is under way”.  I prefer to think of it in the passive voice as a revolution as I don’t support the notion that operational people are revolting!

I saw an article in British Computer Weekly this morning by Jim Mortleman “SOA in the cloud”.

The basic premise of the article is that whilst the hype around SOA is overblown (no, really?!) the fundamental concept is good.  So the solution is…….change the name to cloud computing and press on.

I have been pretty right wing in my views on SOA in the past but I do genuinely believe that the concept is brilliant.  It is delivery that is flawed and there are two good reasons for this:

1.  Organisations take on too big a challenge in trying to deliver a service oriented architecture.  Grand vision = grand design = big bang = big cost = big risk = failed project.  There has to be a more incremental way of getting to SOA.

2.  SOA projects are almost always run by IT people.  No wonder they never meet business requirements.  Put business leaders in charge and watch the priorities change.

I spend a large portion of my life talking to senior customer service professionals.  The common story is that they are tired of IT projects that don’t deliver, and IT departments that cannot respond to change at the speed of business.

Change happens!  New product launches, regulatory change, product promotions, merger/acquisition, processing errors.  Shouldn’t SOA be enabling the business to provide appropriate responses to such change?

If the principles of SOA are to succeed, it is not going to happen by nomenclature, or adding more layers of complexity.  IT professionals need to distil SOA into simpler, more incremental, more business focussed chunks, and empower the business with platforms that enable them to react to everyday change without the usual lead times.

I believe that the ability to make a business operation truly agile will be one of the defining competitive advantages of the next decade.

Sean McGrath wrote an interesting piece at IT World suggesting that use of swivel chair interfacing is often the best integration strategy available to an organisation.

I am not sure how many swivel chairs it would take before Sean would see an automated approach as more suitable.  I’ve certainly seen banks of people doing little more than this type of business process, inconsistently and with plenty of errors – in itself a very expensive way of doing things.  I do, however, take his point and this is not a criticism of what is essentially an excellent post that raises a number of important points.

For me, the most important point Sean raises is that “if you cannot build a new end-to-end business process that covers both systems manually then you do not understand the requirements sufficiently to start coding it.”

These thoughts are also picked up by Reg Braithwaite in an equally excellent post Is software the documentation of business process mistakes?  Reg argues that if your code represents the “user manual” of the business process, then if the code is too complex, this may well be because the process is too complex.  In other words, get the manual process right before you automate it.

The only reason swivel chair integration exists is because of the inflexibility afforded to the business user by the existing systems.  Business users are left with manual as the only option available to them.  It is the quickest, cheapest and most reliable way of getting a business process done – which is a sad indictment on the state of affairs in IT.

My interest in this subject is that innovative solutions like Blue Prism are trying to address these issues, bringing agility to the business, but without damaging the integrity of the underlying systems, or creating the need for new code.

There will always be some place for swivel chair integration but let’s keep it to a minimum.  Once a process can be done manually, the only things that should prevent it from being automated are the need for human interaction, or the need for human intelligence (e.g. expert judgement).

My feeds from the blogosphere are bringing a sense of the rise (again) of chatter around SOA and how to sell it to the business – oh dear, here we go again.

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Following on from my last post about CIO recognition in the board room I was excited to discover that relevant coverage had reached the mainstream press, notably the venerable Financial Times.  An article by Alan Cane titled “It’s much too early to write off the role of the CIO” looked right on the sweet spot…..until I read it.

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As a shareholder and customer of Standard Life, I was pleased to read that their SOA initiative has saved £60M in its ten year lifespan.

SOA case studies (well, successful ones, at any rate) are all too rare.  SL’s is also based on principles of reuse.  Although there are different views on this subject, I cannot help but think that reusing services in many different processes is a good way of saving money (and thereby cost justifying the investment).

CIO, Keith Young said “SOA helps us get products to market faster” he later followed “We contract out some routine things, but generally we try to exploit the expertise of our in-house staff.”

This sounds a bit like an in-house IT function that acts as a trusted adviser to the business.  I will be holding Standard Life for now, and I’ll look forward to a super bonus when my endowment policy matures.

I was at a large telco last week chatting to the manager of a 1,000 seat call centre.

We were talking through the inconveniences that agents have to go through in terms of navigating through a variety of systems just to give the customer what they needed, in this case upgrading their contract.

The problems were obvious in terms of the corporate systems.  Like any other enterprise, these were divided into functional silos paying little regard to the business process.  However, additional difficulty had been added by the use of complex spreadsheets as workarounds for missing system functionality.  Am I painting a grim picture?  Not at all – I see this in every large call centre, not to mention back office.  This is the norm for operational managers – they come to expect it.

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I suppose there are some similarities between mashups and ETL tools, as pointed out by Jacob Ukelson, in that they can extract data from a variety of different systems, play around with that data and then write it somewhere – a web page, an aggregated UI, another target application etc.  This offers a new perspective on data cleansing, process automation and orchestration, screen aggregation and much more, but without the need to access the back end systems.  No database transactions here, and no coding either.

Jacob wonders whether IBM can seriously launch into this space next year, as they state.

Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery and I welcome IBM’s efforts.  The very fact that they are even trying to enter the space, validates a market that it is very difficult for the smaller vendors like Blue Prism to build alone.

Just thought I’d alert you to Blue Prism Software Architect, Ciaran Gultnieks’ blog.  He doesn’t really need or want the publicity but if you are technically inclined or you like chickens and ducks you should give it a read.

Ciaran is currently experimenting and comparing CouchDB, Mnesia and MySQL which, if you are still reading, perhaps you should jump across and see what it’s all about.

I asked our CTO, Dave Moss, if he fancied writing a few guest posts on this blog, on the topic of developing a software product.

I think blogs should represent the views of the author and that there should be a single author.  However, you may recall me saying that Dave is the “techie” I respect the most of all I have met.  So having read his first effort (below), three comments sprung to mind:

1. I totally agree with his views in this instance and, therefore, since they exactly match my own, I am happy to put them on this blog in my name.
2. Dave is one of those rare CTOs who has acute commercial focus and places the highest emphasis on customer need, when evaluating product development objectives.
3. The writing is in Dave’s hand and his analogies stink!  So I refute responsibility for the way the message is communicated.

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