The economic downturn, and outsourcing choices
That's the title of a
short online poll that we're now running, in conjunction with
CIO.co.uk - the online presence of CIO Magazine in the UK (the sister of the "big brother" CIO Magazine in the US).
If you're in a senior IT management role, we'd really like to hear about how the economic situation looks like affecting where your company gets its IT services from. If you know someone else who's in a senior management role, it would be great to hear from them, too. Just pass them the
link.
This poll is set to be the first in a monthly series that we'll run in conjunction with CIO.co.uk, as part of the community's new "Debate" channel. We'll be taking the results from each poll, and using them as input to monthly opinion articles from MWD analysts that will be hosted over at CIO.co.uk. Members of the CIO community will be invited to pitch in with their views, and all of those will be posted alongside our piece. We'll be picking off a range of topics in the coming months, and we're really excited about participating. It should be fun, and we should be able to uncover some valuable insights, too.
The results of this first poll are set to be delivered as part of the first MWD opinion piece towards the end of November. The more responses we receive, the better our articles should be - so please see if you can spare us a few minutes. As we post our articles, we'll be sure to highlight them here so you can check them out.
Labels: CIO, MWD, open source, outsourcing, poll
Interviewing Avaya on Communications-Enabled Business Processes (CEBP)
The other week I participated in a podcast interview with Avaya's
Gordon Loader, discussing Communication-Enabled Business Processes (CEBP). This is something that Avaya's been talking about for some time, but it's only recently that it's taken a little more form as an idea. The confluence of trends in collaboration, unified communications and BPM is something that's very interesting to us, given our active collaboration and BPM research programmes.
In the interview, Gordon and I discuss what CEBP is; why it's interesting; what the potential benefits are; and we also touch a little on how you can get started in exploring where CEBP might add value in your organisation. We talk not only about the kind of "firefighting" scenarios that come most immediately to mind (using telephony and/or messaging to make contact with people when there's some kind of process problem that needs urgent resolution) - but also process scenarios related to sales and marketing, product development, and more. It's worth a listen, I think!
You can find the podcast interview
here (though you'll need to register with ETM as a subscriber to access the audio itself). The title of the page is a little misleading, as we don't just talk about "how Avaya defines CEBP"...don't let that put you off.
Labels: avaya, BPM, collaboration, podcast
Software Delivery InFocus podcast - ALM challenges and direction in the real world
Following the first Software Delivery InFocus podcast which we published in September, October sees Bola Rotibi's second podcast episode, in which she discusses a series of questions focused on the topic of Application Lifecycle Management (ALM). Her guests are John Leegte (ICT Architect at the Dutch Tax and Customs department, Belastingdienst) and Steve Jones (Head of SOA and SaaS for Capgemini’s global outsourcing business).
Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) is a topical subject that has garnered significant column inches in recent months, as many of the leading players in the market have launched new versions of their ALM solutions, and make strategic announcements concerning future directions and customer services and support. Over the last few months we have either heard about or seen previews of products from the likes of Borland, Compuware, HP, IBM, Microsoft, MKS, Polarion and Serena, to name but a few. Software is seen by many organisations as a key enabler of business value - whether that be through improving operational efficiency, competitive differentiation or business/ product innovation. With this in mind, an ad hoc approach to software application lifecycle management cannot provide the predictability, visibility and traceability that organisations require of a process that has such a significant impact on the balance sheet. So - how relevant and applicable is ALM now and in the future, particularly in light of today's technology and business environments, when issues such as agility are so much to the fore?
The episode is slightly longer than normal (clocking in at 41'55"). There was so much good material in the conversation, we didn't want to cut anything! Thanks very much to both John and Steve for such a great conversation.
You can download the audio
here or alternatively you can
subscribe to the podcast feed to make sure you catch this and all future podcasts!
As with all the episodes in this podcast series, we've also published a companion report which summarises the discussion and "key takeaways". You can find it
here, and it's free to download for all MWD's Guest Pass research subscribers (
joining is free).
Labels: agile, development, podcast, SOA
Links for 2008-10-29 [del.icio.us]
Labels: MWD
Microsoft announces Office Communications Server R2
Almost 12 months to the day after Microsoft launched its realtime messaging, presence and conferencing server, Office Communications Server 2007 (OCS), the company today announced the follow-up release of the product, referred to as "R2".
Currently in private beta testing (and due for public release in February 2009) , OCS R2 enhancements focus largely on telephony-based features, for example enabling individuals to dial into the audio part of a web conference without the need to be online, as well as support for SIP trunking. There is also a strong leaning towards supporting call centre and admininstrative roles within organisations. OCS R2 includes a dedicated "attendant console", which allows individuals to act as delegates so that, for example, a PA or central receptionist would be able to manage incoming calls. In a similar vein, a "response groups" feature enables a single call to be routed to multiple users in turn until it finds someone who is available. The new release also provides support for additional mobile platforms - acknowledging that perhaps some people don't use Window Mobile - and includes two-way "single number reach", which extends the existing support for the use of a single number to ring an individual at all of their locations (office, mobile, home, etc.) at once, so that calls from any of those locations appear to come from that number.
The new version also marks the introduction of the persistent chat technology that came from Microsoft's acquisition of Parlano in October 2007, and provides for more seemless integration with Office Communicator for desktop sharing, as well as support for HD video and improved call monitoring.
This new product release highlights the growing convergence between the historically separate worlds of software and telephony, with vendors on both sides extending their reach into the other market in a bid to deliver collaboration and/or unified communications. From my perspective (which you can see
here), it is becoming increasingly difficult to consider these two vendor markets as distinct, although at the business end the budgets continue to be split in the majority of organisations. What is clear is that communication is a major underpinning of any strategy for improving collaborative working practices, and as organisations' implementations of such practices mature, the technology convergence will only increase.
If you are embarking on a collaboration initiative, you need to consider the role of your telephony infrastructure as part of that initiative. Furthermore, you need to think about the integration that will be necessary to ensure that that you don’t introduce communication stovepipes and bottlenecks that will constrain the value of your collaboration investment. Finally, you should look to vendors who are able to sit on both sides of the collaboration software/telephony divide (our collaboration assessments and vendor comparison tool should help).
You can see our assessment of Microsoft's collaboration portfolio (pre-OCS R2)
here.
Labels: collaboration, Microsoft
Notes from a BPM conference
Last week I spent a couple of days in London, at IRM's 2008
Business Process Management Conference Europe, where I took in most of the sessions and also ran a session myself. I've been meaning to do a quick write-up of what I came across for a few days... so here it is.
I think this was the first time that IRM UK (most known for technology conferences, seminars and training courses focusing on Enterprise Architecture, software development techniques etc) had run a BPM conference. The event was put together with the assistance of
BPTrends, the
BCS and the
Process Renewal Group; and the
BPM-Forum,
ABPMP and the
BPM Journal were also involved. The infamous (well, in certain circles)
Richard Soley and
Howard Smith were also in attendance. All in all, we certainly weren't short of serious-minded types ;-)
Most of my time was spent in the "case study" sessions, each of which was led by one or two representatives from industry who'd embarked on a BPM initiative of some kind and come out the other end with all limbs intact. (I had an ulterior motive, which was to seek out volunteers for our own BPM case study programme, which you can
find out more about if you like). I attended sessions by a Danish pensions administrator; a UK pension fund manager; a (very large) telecoms operator; the European Court of Human Rights; a UK hospital trust; and an oil/energy giant.
What did they have in common? At a high level, not much - but that in itself was interesting. One organisation was imposing standard processes throughout most of its operation, catalysed by a mind-bogglingly large SAP rollout. One was really doing some pretty lightweight content lifecycle management, even though on quite some scale. One was pursuing an ingenious application of Business Process Management Suite (BPMS) technology to implement process automation and performance monitoring without any direct interaction with existing applications. One implemented virtually no new technology, but revolutionised a key process and dramatically improved its business as a result. And one was primarily focusing on cataloguing and attempting to standardise ways of representing existing business processes.
Here's a handful of choice quotes I jotted down from the sessions and from coffee-break conversations - they're all thought-provoking.
"KPIs are units of measure. But you have to know what measures you want – efficiency? Effectiveness? Adaptability?"
"The best thing we did to improve business-IT collaboration was to move to open-plan seating."
"We had plenty of KPIs and SLAs in place; but they were aimed at optimising localised individual activities, rather than our performance against the sales promises we were making."
"Senior business managers don't like detail and so often don't like the idea of 'process'. They see it as detail, and about something that doesn't sound very agile."
"Most organisations have a functional management structure, but in a complex business this isn't sufficient. It doesn't actually support delivering a good customer experience."
"Everything you do in process management should be related to performance."
"We decided not to blindly look for best practice. Instead we chose to work around something we called 'best available practice' - the best of what was already being done inside the company; stuff we knew would work within our culture."
"[A large German auto manufacturer] has created around 15,000 services from its SOA initiative. That's probably not a good thing."
Given the timing (this was just as the financial services universe was beginning to collapse in on itself) the event seemed to be pretty well-attended (the sponsors that I spoke to certainly seemed happy, anyway). My two key take-aways?
- First: luckily (for my prejudices ;-), what I came across further confirmed what we thought was the case, from the research we've done in the BPM area through 2008. In the real world, there's still not really much consensus about what BPM is, what it's made of, and how you know when you're doing it (let alone when you're doing it well).
- Second: The one thing that all except one case study (and many conversations) highlighted was that the buy-in of senior management is absolutely crucial to success. The culture, management structure and operating model(s) of your organisation are the biggest determinants of the the kind of BPM initiative you'll be able to follow, and the likelihood of you being able to achieve a successful result.
Overall I'd say it was a really solid event, and I'm definitely going to be responding to the Call for Papers for 2009, if I'm invited. Along the way I also learned that only around 1% of the audience (based on a rough count) was pursuing a Six Sigma initiative, that around 5% were pursuing SOA, and that although around 10% had heard of the word "mashup", no-one would admit to having created one. Viz. the level of awareness/adoption of SOA, I think this is just one more data point that shows how dangerous it is to make simplistic assumptions about the relationship between BPM and SOA (I talked more about that
here and
here, as well as in
this report within our BPM advisory service).
Over the coming days I hope to finally get around to writing up more detailed notes from each of the sessions I attended, and I'll post them to our
BPM blog.
Labels: BPM, conference
