I have been intrigued by Peter Fingar's post about his book "Dot Cloud: The 21st Century Business Platform Built on Cloud Computing" (Meghan-Kiffer Press, February 18, 2009). Actually, we have almost 90 years left to watch for such platform but it's always appealing to look behind the curtains of the future...
I share the good feeling about the success of 'Amazoned' Internet but I also remember the sound of blowing 'DOT-COM's that happened right before my eyes. Mr. Fingar believes that the next Internet transformer will be the Cloud Computing. With no arguments so far, he throws the marketing buzz on the reader: "Cloud computing makes it possible to create new "business platforms" that can enable companies to change their business models and collaborate in powerful new ways with their customers, suppliers, and trading partners - stuff that simply could not be done before. What that stuff is, is up to entrepreneurs and intrapreneurs. But no doubt there are cloudy new Amazons and Googles hard at work, and they will no doubt teach the business world new lessons." Well, with all respect and with all possible bravery, I would 'held my horses' when talking about teaching "the business world new lessons" based on the experience of a couple of companies specialised in the retail business only.
I do not think that terms "business platforms" and "business models" are really understood by the author, at least, it seems so from the mentioned statement. If companies were chosen an 'ad-hock' collaboration with their customers, suppliers, and trading partners via Internet, they would do this already having a decade for making their mind. Technical solutions like ebXML allowed such collaboration about 7 years ago. However, this has not happened. Modern business behavioural pattern has not changed much for last several centuries - Business is based on personal trust, not on cloudy anonymity (even entrepreneurial).
I do appreciate the statement "What's important for companies to consider today is that cloud computing isn't about technology; it's about technology-enabled business models and business innovation" but would like to see more material evidence of business values of Clouds (saving money on IT does not create any new business values, by the way). There are several voices that in spite of Cloud fanfares ask how separated remote de-touched Cloud Computing with nearly unlimited computational capabilities relate to the concept of business flexibility and merge between Business and Technology, which is one of the pre-conditions of such flexibility. Business innovations is not in the ability to deploy humongous software systems quickly but in ability to model new business ideas without long explanations to technical experts who are supposed to operate the modelling systems. This ability is based on close collaboration between Business and Technology, on the co-location and cooperation in the generation of business ideas rather than on departure Technology into the Clouds.
"Cloud Oriented Business Architecture (COBA) opens new possibilities for business... COBA, centered on what I call "situational business processes," will open new frontiers in how companies redesign their value chains to deliver their goods and services," Mr. Fingar says. So, what are these possibilities? Why companies would "redesign their value chains to deliver their goods and services"? Why all these sound technologies - "Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), Web Oriented Architecture (WOA, a Web-based subset of SOA), and Process Oriented Architecture (as in BPM)" - that compose COBA according to Mr. Fingar should be attractive to Business?
Mr. Fingar explains that "situational business processes" are the answer to the need of handling multiple Value Chain processes happening simultaneously; this appears as the major challenge for Business nowadays according to him. Actually, I think that modern business environment can be characterised more accurately not by multiple Value Chains or Fingar's "Value Threads" but by massive and frequent changes, which regular Value Chain caused business processes are incapable to keep up with irrespective to their amount or parallel execution. It is not clear to me why Mr. Fingar has found that companies have to work with multiple processes in parallel only now and not 10 years ago. Industry had this task even at the time when M. Ported created his theory of Value Chain.
Anyway, let's look into what "situational business processes" means in the Mr. Fingar description: "Reusable business process fragments (services) can be reused in many contexts and settings: The key is in reusable business process fragments, not just reusable software. Those reusable process fragments can be tapped as companies design innovative business processes as "situational business processes" across multiple business channels. That is, they can be adapted to completely new business situations: new initiatives, new campaigns,
and new projects. So it is that service-oriented software flexibility and reuse enables business process flexibility and reuse. That's the stuff of Cloud Oriented Business Architecture in the hyper-competitive markets of the 21st century. Just as client/server and n-tier distributed architectures have given IT great flexibility, COBA gives
business leaders the flexibility to form new bonds with customers and suppliers in real-time." Well, I have to admit - I am almost lost: there are a lot of right words but I am not sure I understand their logic.
First of all, it is well-known that "service-oriented software flexibility and reuse" do not enable "business process flexibility and reuse" because of many reasons including the followings:
1) business process not necessary has to deal/contain a software;
2) business process as an ordered sequence of activities is inflexible by definition and, on the contrary, it tends to stability and 'repetability'. This is because the most informative attribute of the ordered sequence of activities is this order itself while the activities do not really matter (though their results do);
3) non service-oriented process (i.e. the process as an ordered sequence of activities) does not need any service-oriented software. Business process becomes flexible only when it is defined as business capabilities independently from its implementation - via an ordered sequence of activities or not. In other words, the business process becomes flexible when it becomes the business service.
Irrespective to the process-service relations, I do not see why Business would need to become Cloud Oriented Business; Business can use the same technologies listed above without the Clouds. That is, SOA and its flexibility does not justify the statement "That's the stuff of Cloud Oriented Business Architecture". Moreover, it is not that obvious, at least to me, why "COBA gives business leaders the flexibility to form new bonds with customers and suppliers in real-time" while COBA addresses the technology means only (where is the business value?) and why Business needs "new bonds with customers and suppliers in real-time" to reach the level of business flexibility adequate to the pace of market changes?
Talking about "business fragments", I have not found many reusable business elements in the enterprises that have a process-centric organisation (process management does not like to share providers as this is viewed as potential risk to the process; this is the process-oriented mentality). So, until the company becomes a Service-Oriented Enterprise (SOE), no technology can significantly change the business environment, especially if Technology hides in the non-transparent Clouds.
Here is another quote from the Mr. Fingar's post: "On-demand processes can be mashed up in new ways as participants in other processes, depending on the situation at hand. For example, an airline's processes for flight planning, reservations, and ticketing could be mashed up with a conference organizer's registration process. In each unique situation, the policies and business rules governing the processes will likely be slightly different. Situational business processes, whose unintended contexts may draw on a given company's core processes, could become the norm; and they must be managed as diligently as all other mission-critical business
processes." And here are my questions:
1) Why we need Cloud Computing for described business-cases?
2) Who said that "an airline's processes for flight planning, reservations, and ticketing could be mashed up with a conference organizer's registration process" made without preliminary preparation is acceptable for the airline company? It should be known to IT enthusiasts that if the conference organisers are not well respectful people, this will hit the reputation of the airline company, which Business never accepts. It does not matter if we use 'orchestration' or 'mash' when we combine the flight planning process with the conference registration process, none of these processes become more or less flexible because of the combination.
3) How many times we have to burn our fingers? How many times we have to learn that "company's core processes" and other resources may not be exposed to external customers whilst the process internals are exposed to the external use? We did it with web-enabling and acquired the tragic failure 8-10 years ago (and went through the painful process of understanding that Web Application is not the same thing as Web interface to a legacy application). This is just another argument for the benefit of the service-orients Values Network methodology against the process-oriented Value Chain methodology.
I am afraid that my comments would totally loose in front of Mr. Fingar's "The message for IT is to lead, follow, or get out of the way, for COBA is here to stay as the world shifts from using information technology (IT) for transaction and information management to a far more organic business technology (BT) for innovation in the Cloud."
Yes, guys, "get out of the way for COBA" that has appeared from the Cloud and will hide in the Cloud, leaving us black-boxed but "organic business technology (BT) for innovation in the Cloud", not for innovation in Business...
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