The Insider's Guide to Next-Generation BPM
By Tarak Modi, VP & CTO, CALIBRE Systems , 03/05/2009
Print this article
Email this article
Talk Back!
Write to Editor
Once upon a time there was a brave consultant who traveled to many companies across many distant lands. Even though the companies she visited were diverse in their pursuits, she encountered many a common theme. She would ask the same question to different business units within the same company and get terrifyingly different answers. She noted that meeting new strategic initiatives was a guaranteed scary proposition and that IT was viewed as that multi-headed monster better known as a bottleneck. Amazingly, information was almost never available at the right place to the right people at the right time, and if it was it really could not be trusted! To add insult to injury, no matter how hard the employees seemed to work they always seemed to be one step behind from where they needed to be.
Then one day this brave consultant came upon a company where IT was a strategic partner with the business supporting such amazing capabilities as portability, interoperability, and extensibility. IT value was completely justified; there was a sense of reduced risk and an unprecedented amount of flexibility in make, buy, and sourcing decisions. Employees in this company worked less, were more relaxed, and yet they managed to stay ahead of their peers in their market. How could this be? And it was that fateful day that she discovered the wonders of enterprise architecture!
Hmm...is this déjà vu?
Alas, if only the above narration were just a story! Unfortunately, this "story" is my experience and more than likely the experience of each and every one of you reading this article. Yes, it is true that a deliberate enterprise architecture can really transform the way a company does business. It can provide a strategic foundation that realizes the company's operating model, and can incorporate the necessary governance processes to ensure the continued alignment of the enterprise architecture with the operating model as it evolves.
Such claims of positive transformation are supported by numerous surveys conducted by reputed institutions such as Gartner, Infosys, Harvard Business School, etc., which show that companies with a well-articulated, deliberate enterprise architecture consistently outperform their peers who lack such an enterprise architecture by achieving higher profitability, better productivity, and lowered IT costs. All this sounds great, but unfortunately, have you ever heard of a free lunch? Veteran architects will undoubtedly attest to the fact that enterprise architecture is a complex undertaking that takes hard work and commitment from all levels of an organization, especially from the higher levels. The good news is that there is a broad base of knowledge to leverage in the field of enterprise architecture, most of which is encapsulated in well-known enterprise architecture frameworks such as TOGAF, Zachman, and others.
-1-
Best Practices in Moving Processes to the Clouds
How Can the Cloud Fit Into Your Applications Strategy?
Cloud Data Integration Best Practices
The Economics of Cloud Computing
Data Services Insight: Successful implementation of Canonical Information Models
ebizQ editorial highlights and updates, compiled by Site Editor Anne Stuart
March 10, 2011
The sixth annual BPM in Action 2011 Virtual Conference will explore cutting-edge market developments in BPM and describe how to leverage them for improved business operation and performance. More
Date:Apr 07, 2010
Time:13:00 PM
ET- (17:00 GMT)
Date:Apr 07, 2010
Time:12:00 PM
ET- (16:00 GMT)
In part two of Joe McKendrick's recent podcast with Miko Matsumura, chief strategist for Software AG, they talk about how SOA and IT systems need to change and grow and adapt with the organization around it.
Listen Now
Phil Wainewright interviews David Vap, VP of products at RightNow Technologies, and finds out how sharing best practices can help businesses understand how best to engage with online communities.
Listen Now
Scott Hebner, Vice President of Marketing and Strategy for IBM Rational, discusses a topic on the top of every company's mind today: getting the most from IT investments.
Listen Now
In BI, this tough economy and the increasing role of Web 2.0 and MDM are certainly topics on people's minds today. WiseAnalytics' Lyndsay Wise addresses each of them in this informative podcast.
Listen Now
Deepak Singh, President and CTO of Adeptia, joins ebizQ's Dennis Byron in a podcast that gets its hand around the trend of industry-specific BPM.
Listen NowSmart event processing can help your company run smarter and faster. This comprehensive guide helps you research the basics of complex event processing (CEP) and learn how to get started on the right foot with your CEP project using EDA, RFID, SOA, SCADA and other relevant technologies. Learn More
A lot of people are talking about Enterprise 2.0 as being the business application of Web 2.0 technology. However, there's still some debate on exactly what this technology entails, how it applies to today's business models, and which components bring true value. Some use the term Enterprise 2.0 exclusively to describe the use of social networking technologies in the enterprise, while others use it to describe a web economy platform, or the technological framework behind such a platform. Still others say that Enterprise 2.0 is all of these things. Learn More
|
|
This new publication from our sister site SearchSOA.com explores workflow, business activity monitoring (BAM) and complex event processing (CEP) issues. |
|
|
