Business Engineering
Emerging Trends
SystemicLogic News FeedThe major impetus behind collaboration (among other aspects) is the widespread use of Web-based applications and the rapid advances in the development of information and communication technologies. These changes have resulted in the emergence of highly networked global enterprises and an increased preference by the organisations to a project-based approach to work. The collaboration ecosystem generally consists of people, productivity software, collaborative software and collaboration methods.
How organisations are using Collaboration Tools
The demand for virtual interactions between individuals within the same premises and from different locations has been increased significantly over the past few years.
- Many organisations are now using Collaboration Tools chiefly to enable both the co-located and the geographically dispersed employees to get work done and achieve common goals.
- Collaborative technology is being used to build virtual communities, to improve business processes and enhance customer service.
- Enterprise portals are now being developed to improve content aggregation and the integration of business applications.
- Organisations are also looking for opportunities to strengthen security around their collaboration technologies and initiatives.
The value of the tools is more pronounced where they facilitate real-time on line collaboration between individuals or groups located in different places and in different time zones. A typical example includes Alfresco (an Open Source company) that is using Skype to maintain collaboration of its widely distributed staff. In addition, Collaboration Tools have created on line platforms with a high affinity to innovation. These platforms have the potential to nurture innovation at different levels of an enterprise and breakdown silos traditionally associated with legacy systems. The CSCW Matrix highlights a number of play fields for Collaboration Tools.
Collaboration Tools Features
Although commercial and open source solutions are found in various collaboration facets such as project management, file and document sharing, event scheduling etc, their collaborative features are more similar than different. Here are some basic capabilities of the tools:
- Mail Transfer Agent
- Mail Storage
- IMAP Server
- Shared IMAP
- Calendar & Formats
- Shared Contacts
- Shared Files
- Web Admin UI
- Anti-Virus
- Spam Filtering
- Shared Calendar
- IM Server
- WebDAV and Web UI
ASCTs
Apache, Mozilla, Wikipedia are cases in point of the most successful open source projects driven by collaborative environments. ASCTs have become more attractive to budget constrained businesses looking to maximize their cost effectiveness. Reduced time to market with lower total cost of ownership and greater transparency into the engineering process are balanced by governance challenges, and to a lesser extent issues with conflicting terms and conditions and/or licensing dichotomies. They offer a central hub to communicate a shared vision allowing information and knowledge to be captured and be made available to all members of a user community. The solutions offer real-time updates, real-time help requests and self-service archiving capabilities. In recent years, open-source productivity tools and collaboration suites have advanced in reliability, feature sets, and overall sophistication. Since open-source technologies are community-driven and not tied to commercial interests, they can often address community needs better, more quickly, and potentially at lower cost. In the corporate world collaboration projects mainly involve streamlining business processes, and the interfaces between legacy closed systems.
In the ASCTs category, SystemicLogic Research Institute recently conducted an assessment of Scalix, eGroupWare, OpenGroupware and Open-Xchange Server. The tools were compared based on how well they match a client's business requirements. A set of attributes were used to build focus areas for measuring the applications. Two major performance metrics most relevant to this category namely Collaboration Tools Support and Collaboration Tools Technical Quality were examined. A decision model was used to present the relative position of measured products and was normalized to show strengths and weaknesses compared to other products.
Overcoming Challenges in using ASCTs
In order to gain business advantage, organisations have to deal with a number of issues related to the use and implementation of ASCTs.
Strategic planning
Careful planing must involve acknowledgment of existing technologies and methodologies and connecting them with a layer of lighter weight, more agile applications which demonstrate alignment with company objectives. Strategic planning cost is trivial compared to cost of deploying non-compatible systems for different departments.
Defining collaboration requirements
Companies face a challenge in not only identifying the right tools but to use the solutions in the right way. It is important to make an effort to study and select a set of tools that meet current and future business requirements. An understanding of existing Collaboration Tools and an in depth introspection of the enterprise to match its collaboration needs should be made a prerequisite to adoption.
Justifying Return on Investment in Collaborative Environments
Part of SystemicLogic's consulting entails work to justify and validate the returns that will accrue from investing into collaboration environments. The business world is currently dominated by business individuals who are so particular about budgets and literal money savings. Against this background the rationale for collaboration, social computing, Enterprise 2.0 and many other technological business process enablers are scrutinised rigorously for value propositions that demonstrate the ability to generate profits. Fortunately forty-eight percent of end customers are looking to streamline business processes, rather than endure pure cost cuts. Thus one way to justify the value of ASCTs can be to communicate to business how the tools assist in spending money more efficiently, rather than simply cutting heads.
Threat to company security
Some critics regard Collaboration Tools such as SharePoint, wikis and even e-mail distribution systems as great in “theoretical” tools but that the majority pose siginificant security risks in practice. However, administrators need to actively monitor the distribution and usage of user names and passwords. Failure to take these measures compromises security and exposes the systems to people who should not have access.
Conclusion
The collaboration between different enterprises and employees within one company has exponentially grown. Tasks and responsibilities are shared within one project team by using interaction between all project or group members. During this unprecedented global economic downturn, ASCTs have become attractive options for international teams and consulting companies to get projects and business to not only to run efficiently but also to perform exceptionally. Given the increased demand for collaboration software against tight IT budgets the future of ASCTs looks 'orange'. However, companies need to be aware of the challenges associated with the software and how to deal with them.
Refer to additional content on Slideshare,
Open Source Collaboration Tools are Good For You!
Coming up next on Alternative Source are enterprise content management systems.
A fortnight ago, SystemicLogic South Africa conducted a very successful workshop around Innovation during the downturn. A group of IT executives, business leaders and other stakeholders from various backgrounds attended the workshop. Apart from the presentations from SystemicLogic's experts, the workshop ended with thought provoking discussions on topical innovation issues relevant to this contemporary business milieu. A consolidated view of the discourse is now available on the research portal. It consists of the initial questions or comments and is then followed by the key points made during the following discussion. The report has been consolidated into key themes that emerged and structured as a guideline for approaching these innovation hurdles and topics.
Here are some of the major questions that were tabled and examined.
- How do you drive innovation in a silo based organisation?
- The technology platforms for innovation are available but are not being taken up?
- If ideas are available and plentiful why are they not being implemented?
- How do we identify talent within an organisation?
- Does innovation not run a risk of becoming just another buzzword?
In these interesting times companies are seeking a competitive advantage that differentiates themselves from their opposition. There is no doubt that the future will not be business as usual and that the playing field has definitely changed. Innovation has a major role to play in this new landscape as organisations attempt to make sense of and thrive in the new world. Needless to say, there are challenges to innovation that stand in the way, but with the right approach they can be overcome. As the breadth and understanding of innovation has grown and as people and companies grapple with and learn from their experiences, the topic of innovation has moved to the forefront of organisational agendas. This has resulted in more focus on the process of innovation and greater expectations of the potential and results of innovation. As we learn from the successes and failures of innovation we gain a better understanding of how to encourage, promote and drive it within our organisations and how to improve the entire innovation ecosystem as we strive for sustainable innovation.
To continue with discussion of these questions join SystemicLogic Research Group on LinkedIn.
A number of frameworks and methodologies including TOGAF, CoBIT, ITIL and IT Balanced Scorecards have been designed and further developed with a view to enhance IT governance. Despite the enormous IT investment in recent years, demonstrating the returns of investment in terms of organisational performance has proven extremely difficult. In many organisations IT is yet to deliver to its full potential and clients are still generally unhappy about their IT service delivery. Several questions come to the fore:
- Why is it that business has become more skeptical regarding further investing in IT?
- What could be the key stumbling blocks to IT service delivery improvement?
- Is it the failure to implement governance frameworks?
- Is it the lack of commitment from leadership to improve IT
performance?
- Or is it the long standing discord between business and IT?
In today's dynamic business environment, information plays a key role in achieving success. It enables an organization to pro-actively prepare for any environmental change. To enhance performance the modern corporate IT functions require robust MIS. This is because MIS consists of technology enabled tools and systems that help to systematically acquire, store, maintain, allow rapid retrieval and manage proliferation of aggregated information for selected IT managers and executive users within an organisation. SystemicLogic's experience indicates that data and information landscapes in many IT departments resemble the classic “Winchester Architecture Disaster”. Resulting challenges that militate against IT's end-to-end performance were identified:
- A large number of IT leaders lack of a holistic understanding of IT processes and how they are performing
- Data and information are not contextualised for stakeholders and are not provided at the right level of detail
- There is little to no analysis of data and data does not provide much management information
- Operational and transactional data does not logically translate into meaningful information for further analysis
- Costly data duplication across enterprises
- Use of outdated data and ultimately inaccurate information
- Manual data collection and hard coding is commonplace
- Collected information is used for the wrong purposes
- Inadequate data and information governance including standardisation
- Investments in new IT hardware and software tools is not business driven
If effectively applied, MIS deployment can present a very plausible strategy to leverage IT-based data not only to align with business and deliver the expected outputs, but also provide an imperative to naturally address information related issues such as data cleansing, standardisation and classification.
How does MIS bring value to IT Management?
A well orchestrated MIS can deliver great benefits to enterprise IT departments.Core competencies
Every enterprise IT division will have at least one core competency, that is, a function they perform better than its colleagues in other organisations. By building an exceptional management information system into the enterprise IT it is possible to push out ahead of the competition. MIS provides the tools necessary to gain a better understanding of the internal IT landscape as well as a better view of the enterprise itself.Enhancing management
Improved reporting of IT processes leads inevitably to a more streamlined service. With better information on the process comes the ability to improve the management of the IT, including everything from the sourcing of data to the analytics and visualisation “dash boarding”of the current and future projected state of delivery. Availability Management (eg. ITIL) is a prime example of management benefits that can accrue over time.Rapid reflexes
Better MIS system enable an enterprise to react more efficiently current operating environment, enabling them to push out ahead of the competition and produce better results.IT strategy
The role of MIS is to assist in deliver of consolidated, accurate and summarised information to decision makers regarding the state and performance of IT processes. MIS thus provide a guideline on what innovative strategies to implement in order to not only become more responsive, but also nurture a pro-active view.IT value proposition
MIS creates a milieu for communicating its value to business and internal clients since it will be easier to identify the critical role IT plays and opportunities for investment and improvement.End-to-end performance Measurement of the IT Function
MIS creates milieu for reliable data and information regarding IT performance metrics to be generated and used for decision making. This puts the CIO and his team at a vantage point to understand and rate their service levels. It also makes it easier to align IT strategy with business strategy as the non-technical business executives are likely to understand high level consolidated analytics the MIS realises.Establishing platforms for IT data and information rationalisation
SystemicLogic has conducted extensive, high level and detailed work in this area. Recently a financial services organisation approached SystemicLogic for assistance in designing a high value-adding MIS for its IT division. The initiative aimed at producing solutions that ensures data relating to IT service management data (e.g. service level, capacity, service continuity and availability etc) are adequately collected and stored in definitive data sources, aggregated into complete records then stored into a shared information repository. The repository would then provide a metadata resource base for analytics to be performed and delivered to IT management for strategic, tactical and operations through dash boarding and other summarised reporting tools. It would also ensure more MIS resources are freed up for the detailed analysis required to optimise IT performance and alignment to business.Below is the simplified illustration of the MIS architecture.
There is a growing evidence that lack of application of the MIS concept by many corporate IT functions has resulted in huge challenges in rationalising IT data and information. It has also been a stumbling block for easy retrieval and dissemination to IT management and business. Successful MIS design and development offers the promise of IT information integration as well synchronisation of IT strategy with current and future business strategy. For the intelligent CIO there can be no better time than now, to optimise IT delivery by exploring MIS capabilities.
Workshop Briefing
In the current economic climate Innovation can very quickly be relegated to the background, yet Innovation has proved beyond doubt that it can change a company's fortune especially during times of adversity. Innovation strengthens the ability of a company to remain competitive and agile in this contemporary networked economy.
With the global crisis and other challenges taking a toll on today's companies, investments in Innovation are being questioned.
Is there a role for Innovation in these interesting times?
Should investing in enterprise Innovation programmes and projects be regarded as priority at all times?
How can we measure Innovation?
What is the relationship between Innovation and Strategy, Innovation and Technology?
Is an Innovation culture an unachievable goal for modern day organisations?
SystemicLogic is inviting you to the Innovation Workshop, where we will touch on the application of Innovation and how your organisation can not only survive, but flourish during challenging times.
General Information
| Date | 13 March 2009 | |
| Agenda | Breakfast (08h30-09h15) | All |
| Keynote (09h15-09h45) | Dr. Jay van Zyl | |
| Presentation (09h45-10h45) | Mr. Rory Moore Getting innovation right and mapping the way forward
| |
| Tea Break (10h45-11h00) | All | |
| Discussion (11h00-12h00) | Topics from the presentation |
Register: R550 excl. VAT
Booking: Contact Coley Zephenia at coley.zephenia@systemiclogic.net or
Call 011 706 3161/ 083 549 5074
Venue
Johannesburg Board Room
SAP Woodmead Business Park
SAP Building One
1 Woodmead Drive
Johannesburg
South Africa
Venue Map
A business rules engine (BRE) is a software component that typically automates the process of defining and managing rules underpinning a company's business logic. This means that there is limited-no hard coding of the business rules and higher flexibility in defining and managing new and established rules enabling easier traceability. A BRE can support higher business complexity associated with the contemporary environment, especially where support for rules with non-linear complexity is required. In addition, non-technical business experts can more effectively administer the rules with reduced technical repercussions. In addition, this automation frees the IT staff from the daunting process of maintaing hard coded rules allowing them to concentrate on value-adding tasks. Ultimately the value of effectively deploying BREs for an enterprise manifests in increased productivity, reduction in costs and improved time to market.
ASBREs enter the business analysis market
The BRE industry is a highly dynamic technology area consisting of commercial products such as ILOG, Fair Isaac, YASU Technologies, Corticon, and open source projects running, for example, JBoss Rules (formerly Drools), OpenRules, Mandarax etc. Existence of standards like RuleML, Java Rule Engine API, OMG Production Rule Representation, ISO Common Logic, W3C Rule Interchange Format, indicates the growing maturity of the technology. Alternative Source packages have also moved up the competition curve as they are fast becoming formidable rivals to their commercial counterparts. As ASBREs' maturity increases, many companies are considering them for implementation in various areas of their IT stacks with a view to streamline business processes at the same time enhance and maintain business agility. They are not only offering the basic BRE components for instance business rule repository, business rule designer or editor, a query and reporting feature and a rules engine execution core, but also offer more sophisticated business functionalities such as business rules integration and facilitating business knowledge transfer across the enterprise.
An overview of the ten leading ASBRE
Jboss Rules
JBoss Rules enables product and service offerings to be customised by applying business rules that can be applied across an SOA based on actions, events, and historical activities. It allows developers to rapidly deploy rules that continuously make consistent decisions based on hundreds of thousands of facts. The declarative programming model of JBoss Rules provides clear data and logic separation and eliminates the time it takes developers to modify hard-coded business logic and update applications deployed across the enterprise. JBoss Rules is based on Drools, the popular open source Java-based rules engine project. The recent JBoss Rules release version 4.0 has expanded the market for rules engines and laid the foundation for bringing rules-based solutions into Simple, Open and Affordable SOA deployments and business process workflowsOpen Rules
OpenRules is a complete BRMS, Business Rules Management System that comes with a simple suite of open source components for Rules-based Application Development and tools such as MS Excel, Google Spreadsheets, and Eclipse IDE, to create complex decision support systems around an enterprise-class Business Rules Repository.Drools
This tool is an Object-Oriented Rule Engine for Java. More importantly, Drools provides for declarative logic programming and is flexible enough to match the semantics of a problem domain. The various parts that compose a rule may be extended to lend domain-specific sense to the rule.Hammurapi Rules
This is yet another JSR-94 compliant rules engine. With Hammurapi Rules Java developers don't need to learn a new rules language. Hammurapi Rules leverages Java language type system and naming conventions to plug rules into its inference engine.The Java Embedded Object Production System (JEOPS)
JEOPS is a Java based forward chaining rules engine. It is used to support the business process by rules in Java Application Servers, client applications, and Servlets.Open Lexicon
This is a business rules and business process management tool that develops applications for transaction and process-based applications. Its salient features include a business rules metadata repository, a business rules engine, and an elaborate web-based UI for managing and testing the business rules. Open Lexicon has process management tools for creating complex interactions within business rules and business objects.Prova
Prova is a rule-based system for Java and agent scripting and information integration extending the Mandarax engine with a proper language syntax and enhanced semantics. It combines natural syntax and typing of Java with Prolog-style rules and database wrappers. Java calls may include both constructor and method calls as well as access to public variables in classes.SweetRules
This software comes with integrated set of tools for semantic web rules and ontologies, that revolve around the Rule Markup/Modeling Language, an emerging standard for semantic web rules. It supports also the closely related Semantic Web Rule Language, along with the OWL standard for semantic web ontologies, which in turn use XML and optionally RDF. SweetRules supports the powerful Situated Courteous Logic Programs extension of RuleML, including prioritised conflict handling and procedural attachments for actions and tests. The most important aspect of this tool is that the SweetRules project is an international, multi-institutional initiative.TermWare
Termware is a rule processing engine intended for embedding into Java applications; JLisa is a competitive framework for building business rules accessible to Java and is compatible with JSR94 V, the Java Rule Engine AP.Zilonis
Zilonis is a multi-threaded rules engine platform and a scripting environment for Java based applications. The core of the Zilonis platform is based on a variation of the forward chaining Rete algorithm.
Selecting and evaluating ASBREs
As with other Alternative Source products, these BREs are undoubtedly very appealing to many information age organisations. However, companies still struggle with establishing the right criteria for selecting top-of-the-spectrum applications that apply to their specific environments. SystemicLogic has recently done some detailed work for a number of clients who intended to acquire the tools. It conducted an in-depth analysis and comparison of JBoss Rules and Open Rules.Check out this work on the research portal...
Business Rules Engines
In the next article in the Alternative Source Software category I will look at Collaboration Tools.
