Why Aligning IT With the Customer Isn’t a Complete Recipe for Innovation
A colleague recently shared an intriguing article from
Information Week,
"Global CIO: Suicide Strategy for CIOs: Aligning IT With The Business"
by Bob Evans. The gist of the article is that (ideally) IT is an integral part of
the business and therefore alignment with “the business” is superfluous:
IT should be aligning itself with customers. At first glance, the article may seem
to be advocating that IT work directly with customers and not worry about other
parts of the business.
But what the author’s really saying is that IT needs
to intertwine with the business and then together the business and
IT will align with customer and market need: “IT teams [that] are intertwined
with the business and are accelerating and enhancing connections with customers
instead of sitting back and waiting to be told by someone else what's happening
out in the world and what, in turn, the IT organization's reactive response should
be…”
A concept missing from the article is how applications
are developed and deployed (details, details). In a truly intertwined model, responsibilities
for developing and maintaining applications begin to change as IT focuses on innovation
and allows the business to take on more responsibility for business applications.
As intertwining builds trust, IT can and must increasingly empower business users
to directly author and maintain portions of applications.
One of the examples of technical leadership and business
innovation is an insurance company that’s launched an online business where
customers can customize their own policies. Business rule technology is often used
for insurance product customization; it allows subject matter experts (like underwriters
or actuaries) to directly author and maintain the underwriting logic that powers
insurance policy process from underwriting and pricing to policy issuance, claims
management and policy renewal. IT no longer has to spend its time making constant
changes to business logic. They are free to focus on deep technology issues—and
innovation.
So the story of this insurance company’s innovation
isn’t just about IT aligning with the customer. It’s about IT intertwining
itself with the subject matter experts and empowering them to take responsibility
for key parts of the application development and maintenance process by owning the
business logic they understand best. If credit scoring rules change, who is better
suited to maintain this than the credit analysts? IT is then free to focus on the
technical infrastructure that will support today’s online business and whatever
the future may bring. By empowering “the business” to own the
logic they understand best, the smart CIO makes applications more flexible and allows
his team to focus on innovation.
Intertwine, Align, Empower, Innovate.
How to Leverage Your SharePoint Investment to Manage Complex Business Processes
With more than $1billion in sales and more than 65% of organizations implementing
SharePoint 2007 within six months (Microsoft Leads A Fragmented, Growing Content
Management Market, June 22 2009, Forrester), SharePoint is moving toward
ubiquity.
Many organizations (including my own) use SharePoint for
document management and portals. Organizations whose enterprise agreements with
Microsoft include large SharePoint licenses are now looking to see how they can
leverage their investment in SharePoint beyond simple document management. And Microsoft
is eager to drive that deployment in order to grow SharePoint’s footprint.
In the Network World article “SharePoint Solutions: Smart Investments in a Recession”
http://www.networkworld.com/community/node/39057, Susan Hanley lists three reasons to invest in SharePoint
during hard economic times. The number one reason is around business process automation.
“Solutions that automate business processes, especially
those processes that are designed to replace lost workers, can help organizations
deliver value with fewer resources. If an organization already owns SharePoint (and
we all know that many do), building an automation solution on the SharePoint platform
may be easier to justify than an expensive investment in business process automation
software.”
I see the potential of Business Process Automation and
the potential of SharePoint. However, I also know that SharePoint is a platform;
it’s not a Business Process Management (BPM) solution. In order to manage
complex processes, custom programming is required, making the initial deployment
and maintenance costly. I’ve spent the last several months exploring how to
help organizations take advantage of their SharePoint investment in a way that delivers
better time to value and enables them to maintain business processes themselves,
without costly consultants.
My starting point was that business rule technology can
help streamline complex processes. However, I knew that there was a layer of process
automation capabilities that was needed to extend SharePoint’s core capabilities.
ShareVis www.sharevis.com
is software that builds upon SharePoint to automate document and forms management.
InRule Technology has partnered with ShareVis to extend and enhance SharePoint to
automate complex processes without custom programming.
Read about the power of this combination
http://www.inrule.com/products/shareVis.aspx and stay
tuned for more information.
Business Rule Standards: "Interesting"
Occasionally I get asked about rule standards. Recently a prospective partner, who
acknowledged that there were not rule standards today, but thought rule standards
were inevitable and imminent:
“…proprietary knowledge (rule) representation
formats will be converging toward a common standard, and this will allow for easy
portability of a knowledge (rule) base from one platform to another. A wide adoption
of SQL by database engine vendors, or growing popularity of PMML [Predictive Model
Markup Language] for representation of predictive models, make good cases for a
similar type of standard (for instance derived from the current OWL/SWRL) to
be adopted sooner or later by rule engine vendors.”
The idea of rule portability and a standard language is
indeed an appealing one. There are a few standards currently in development; the
front-running standards for business rules metadata are RuleML and the Semantics
of Business Vocabulary and Rule (SBVR). However, the way in which these standards
are being developed indicates that their being the standards vendors will adopt
is highly unlikely.
Compare the birth, evolution, and adoption of RuleML and
SBVR with that of SQL and PMML.
SQL was developed by IBM, a leading information management
vendor. Another vendor, Relational Software (now Oracle) saw the potential of relational
database management systems and SQL and released its own SQL-based database. IBM
and Oracle invented and developed a market for products based on SQL. They, along
with Microsoft, remain market leaders.
PMML is developed by The Data Mining Group (DMG), an independent,
vendor-led consortium. Full members of the group include IBM, MicroStrategy, SAS,
and SPSS (soon to be part of IBM); Microsoft, Oracle, and SAP also participate in
the group.
By contrast, RuleML is an academic body. Most of the participants
are from prestigious universities, not vendors. IBM, always a leader in technology
standards, does send a member, but he is from the TJ Watson Research Center, not
Websphere-ILOG. None of the major business rule technology vendors—Corticon,
FICO, IBM-ILOG, InRule, Oracle—participate in RuleML. SBVR is being
developed by the Business Rules Group within OMG. The Business Rule Group members
are primarily consultants who work with business rules, but, again, none of the
members is from the leading business rule technology vendors. Likewise SWRL (which
I’d never heard of and doesn’t seem to have had any activity in 5 years)
has no vendor participants.
Technology standards must be developed and driven by the
leading vendors in the space or they will not be adopted. Not because we vendors
are smarter, but because vendors will develop and adopt standards that will benefit
our customers and help grow our businesses. Vendors don’t drive and
adopt standards just because we’re good guys, but because it helps growth our
business: it’s strategic.
Business rule technology vendors are constantly introducing new capabilities to
benefit our customers and grow our businesses. And while rule standards are “interesting,”
they just haven’t bubbled up to the top of most customers’ requirements
list. When the market is ready, business rule standards will emerge, but they will
most definitely be driven from the vendor community.
The Rules for Beautiful, Flexible Business Processes
Jim Sinur’s insightful blog entry
http://blogs.gartner.com/jim_sinur/2009/07/29/bpm-not-only-saves-money-it-is-visually-appealing/
states one of the more guttural appeals of BPM: “I think deep down we find
BPM visually appealing.” BPM is like the guy who goes to the gym every morning
while we’re checking email: muscle-bound and handsome.
As business users define processes, they may find that defining all the permutations
around decision points can create a workflow that is unwieldy, both in terms of
understanding and ability to maintain, execute, and optimize. The process can get—well—ugly.
Suddenly, Mr. Fitness is extremely inflexible from too time in the weight room (and
orange from too much time in the spray tan booth, but that’s a whole ‘nother
topic, as they say).
For example, a workflow may be defined to execute the very complex logic that determines
eligibility and pricing for insurance. With the permission of my good friends at
ShareVis—whose software helps you create, deploy and maintain very beautiful
processes (www.sharevis.com)-- Figure 1 shows how such
decision logic, when embedded within a workflow, can make a process very complex.
For example, a single, high-level decision point called “Determine Eligibility”
will encompass many underlying decisions and calculations. Figure 2 shows how this
high level decision point within the workflow reduces the complexity of the workflow
shown in the previous graphic. In this case, the ShareVis process calls InRule to
manage and execute the decision logic.
By embedding every decision point within a workflow, organizations are not only
making ugly processes, they’re unintentionally embedding decision logic—thus
moving away from the vision of SOA. To help streamline business processes, organizations
must identify decision logic and manage it differently from flow logic. By externalizing
the decision logic from the workflow, a business rule engine can simplify a workflow
and make the logic easier to update. Using business rule technology with your BPM
tool can help renew the youthful beauty of your most complex business processes.
The underlying rules, logic, and calculations that drive that decision point can
be maintained separately from the workflow, by the subject matter experts. Business
rule technology, like yoga, brings flexibility and deep thought to complement the
power of BPM.
Flexible, beautiful business processes brought to you by the Yogi of IT: Business
Rule Technology.
Namaste.
