Aligning the needs of the business with those of IT via technology such as composite applications and Business Process Management (BPM) can help enable the enterprise agility critical to creating sustained competitive advantage.

That message rang out loud and clear in the ebizQ webinar Best Practices for Managing Complexity, part of the Accelerating Business Change Series sponsored by Magic Software .

ebizQ Vice-President for Strategic Services Beth Gold-Bernstein and Magic’s iBOLT Project Leader Avigdor Luttinger outlined a comprehensive infrastructure that links existing applications and manages technical and business processes.

“The key buzzword today in business is agility,” said Gold-Bernstein, who detailed the benefits of -- and barriers to -- extending and leveraging existing technology. Complex combinations of legacy, packaged, and custom applications, as well as a myriad of operating systems, platforms, and databases at many companies have created “little fiefdoms of information” that “were never meant to integrate or interoperate.”

“No one can afford to rip-and-replace what's already there and start anew,” Gold-Bernstein observed. Because many companies spent a lot of money on Y2K remediation projects, those mainframe systems are here to stay. “However, they were never meant to meet the needs of the new types of business applications: Web applications, and integrating with partners, suppliers and customers,” she added.

Composite applications give enterprises "the ability to assemble new applications from existing components to take whatever already exists in the organization, add some new functionality, change the flow of control, add some process rules, and then rapidly deploy a new business solution," she pointed out.

Gold-Bernstein detailed key parts of what Gartner calls “the enterprise nervous system”: extensive connectivity, intelligent routing of information (especially for error- and cost-reducing automated processes), reusable and standard application interfaces not dependent on hand-coding, B2B integration support, and process visibility and performance metrics that are key factors of Business Process Management.

“As the flow of information across an organization does not belong to any one application, the logic is within the process itself,” she noted. “In the distributed composite application the process is the application. The process has the rules of how the application works as it crosses all these different components.”