| ------------------------------------- The eBusiness Bulletin e-newsletter of BrainStorm Group September 27, 2001 ------------------------------------- ==================================================== -- INTRODUCTION This issue we feature a Conference Preview for the upcoming eBusiness Integration Conference in San Francisco, October 29-31. My interview with William Ulrich provides a brief overview of the topics, case studies, and pre/post conference seminars that will be available next month. Our Experts Corner and Analysts Corner feature interviews with Kate Fessenden of the Aberdeen Group and Julia King of Computerworld, both of whom will be giving presentations in San Francisco. Julia King is the Executive Editor of Computerworld ROI and her executive day presentation on October 29 will discuss some creative ways of figuring out Return On Investment on new initiatives in IT. This is necessary, because while much of what is considered to be best practices, there is a difficulty in showing a positive ROI using traditional metrics. And in these times, if you can't show a good ROI, there is a good chance you won't be able to keep doing your job. Kate's presentation on October 31 will focus on XML's impact on e-business integration and EDI. There is a lot happening in integration. Come to San Francisco and find out for yourself.
Jon Huntress
================================================== Buy all the Ghiardelli Chocolate you could possibly eat? Find out when you Register Early for BrainStorm Groups' (Early registrants will Receive a $100
American Express Gift The general theme of the eBusiness Integration Conference in San Francisco is providing current industry information on EAI, B2B, wireless and legacy systems strategies with an increased focus on business process integration. We have added a new Web Services track that should be of interest. This track will cover the use and deployment of Web Services, which entails the re-use of software components across the enterprise and entire industries using the Web as the vehicle for architecture development and functional re-use. Another new element will be discussions of Enterprise Portals which is an enabler to EAI and adds powerful capabilities to the enterprise integration process. The companies giving case studies include Visa International, Eastman Chemical, Southwestern Bell Communications, Tesoro Petroleum and Sprint. In San Francisco, we will also feature the following pre and post conference seminars: * Accelerating E-Business Integration ======================= Janice VandenBrink, Senior Vice President of Global Acceptance and Performance at VISA International will give the keynote address to begin the conference. She will be talking about Universal Commerce: The Next Economy, which will cover the broader implications of e-commerce from a global perspective. The next talk will be on Building & Measuring ROI for Wireless & Application Integration Projects by Julia King of Computerworld. A longer interview with Julia is also in this issue of the newsletter. William Ulrich will follow with a talk on Collaborative Integration Architecture: Enabling the Paradigm Shift, which will show how integration has now moved into the strategic levels of the IT organization, which means that any new system will be built from an integration based perspective. New architectures will be integrated to incorporate legacy, new systems and Web Services. The last keynote of the day will be Corporate e-Business Transformation through e-Business Integration and Venturing by Mark Klopp, Managing Director, Eastman Chemical Company. At the end of the day there will be an experts panel with the day's speakers who will discuss success factors in e-business integration followed by an evening welcome reception on the Solution Showcase where all the vendors will be available for discussion. ======================= On Tuesday the conference will open with Beth Gold-Bernstein of ebizQ who will give a presentation on the E-business Vendor Roadmap, covering all the major vendors, how they are classified and their offerings. After Beth's presentation, the conference will break into two tracks, an EAI track and a Web Services track. The Web Services Track will be coordinated by Bill Robins of The Stencil Group. Bill's talk is called Understanding the Web Services Landscape. The next presentation in this track will be The Building Blocks for Web Services by Patrick Gannon, President and CEO of OASIS. Ending up this track will be a panel discussion moderated by Bill Robins. The second track will be an EAI track moderated by Richard Medina, Senior Analyst of Doculabs. The first presentation will be on Surveying the Current EAI Landscape and the next will cover EAI and Middleware solutions. This will be followed by a presentation on The Role of Portals in EAI by
Darlene Brown, partner at EMH, LLC and former Gartner analyst. An executive luncheon will be sponsored by Software AG with a presentation from Chris Horak, VP of Business Development. After lunch, the conference will again split into two tracks. The Legacy Integration Track will be chaired by Les Yeamans, President and Founder of ebizQ. The Business Process Integration track will be chaired by Ismael Ghalimi of BPMI.org. The legacy track will begin with EDI and XML: Issues, Options and Directions by Kate Fessenden, Research Director of Enterprise SML at the Aberdeen Group. We have an in Following this will be a case study on Data Integration in the Real World featuring Pat Caputo, Technical Director of Southwestern Bell Communications. The final session for this track will be a Panel on Legacy Integration Solutions hosted by Les Yeamans, President and Founder, ebizQ. The Business Process Integration track will begin with a presentation on Business Process Management's Role in E-Business Integration Ismael Ghalimi. This will be followed by a panel discussion on BPI/BPM solutions moderated by Ismael Ghalimi. The day will end with a Case ======================= Day three returns to single track opening with Ron Shelby, CEO of eFusion Solutions and former CIO, eGM e-Commerce division of General Motors. The opening keynote address will be on Integrating Supply & Distribution Chains into Enterprise Ecosystems. The next talk will be on Overcoming Technical Hurdles to B2B Adoption by JP Morgenthal, author of "Enterprise Application Development with XML and Java". This will be followed by a presentation on Information Portals: A Collaborative Interface by Tyler McDaniel, Director of Application Strategies, Hurwitz Group. There will be a panel on portal solutions chaired by Tyler McDaniel after this. The closing keynote will be especially timely because of the current national and international threats to business. Norman Snow is Security Practice Manager of eSolutions for Sprint and will talk about Business Continuity Planning. There has been heightened interest in business continuity and disaster recovery planning since the attacks in New York. All in all, we have a very strong program on tap. Make plans now to be in San Francisco. Register at: Julia King, Executive Editor of Computerworld ROI, is an award-winning business and technology journalist. Her work for Computerworld has spanned technology management and labor issues
to enterprise software, e-commerce and B2B digital exchanges. Prior to Computerworld, she worked for nearly a decade as a free-lance journalist for a variety of national business and Julia is going to give a presentation in San Francisco about Return On Investment on wireless and application integration projects and how to measure it in non-financial terms. Julia will share what leading edge companies are doing to calculate ROI in non-traditional ways. ROI is a very hot subject now, because of the current world and economic situation nobody can afford to lose even a penny. But ROI can't always be measured in traditional financial terms. This has been true with computers ever since they began showing up on desks in the eighties. Everyone said computers would improve business, but for many years there was no way to measure that improvement. All the studies showed that it took just as long to type a letter with a PC as it did when the secretary had a Selectric, and the PC cost a lot more. But once they were on the desktop there was no rational argument that could get them off. We wanted them there, even if we couldn't justify their existence all that well by pointing to the bottom line or to the non-existent paperless world that was supposed to come about. The book, "The Trouble With Computers" by Thomas Landauer was published in 1995 and pointed out that except for doing tasks that couldn't be done before computers, such as huge number crunching tasks, there was no net measurable productivity gain through the use of computers. But the book was written before the Internet burst on the scene to change everything. One of Landauer's conclusions is that we might not be asking the right questions when we try to measure increased productivity. New ways of calculating ROI is a reflection of the need to find a better way to find out just what is happening with our new application integration initiatives. Julia will relate the results of several studies Computerworld has done that show there is a way to calculate ROI in non-traditional ways. As in the above example I gave from the eighties, just the fact that everyone wants one is a good enough argument to keep them. Thankfully that early insistence is beginning to pay off now because of a critical mass of computers and the arrival of the Internet. Julia mentioned some of the new measurements in use are customer loyalty, customer satisfaction, customer retention, employee satisfaction and retention, labor cost, inventory size and brand loyalty. Julia will cover some of the ways businesses are getting metrics for these areas. Some of the results come from polls and surveys and some are based on returning customers and holding on to existing customers. One company calculated how many customers come through it's new wireless system. They can use this number as one of their metrics because the new customers generally do not migrate from the online system. Companies are looking at such things as return on relationships, as one of their measures. Companies also need to measure effectiveness and efficiency. Some of these measures, such as employee satisfaction and job reviews are not hard numbers either. Conduit is a call center in Dublin in the highly competitive European market. They are increasing market share through better customer service and they have had to create a whole new set of employee metrics to do it. Early measures gave an erroneous picture of what was happening because it didn't allow for different employee styles or the different time schedules they worked. Now the measurements are actually created around the strengths of each employee and include clarity of voice, how many times they have to tap into the database and so on. Up to 20% of the employee's wages is determined by these factors. There is still controversy about using non-traditional metrics. Many think you have to use hard numbers to make an evaluation but this wasn't true in the eighties and it isn't true now. Julia This is part of a bigger area of what the technology costs of goods and services really are. One of the more difficult parts of this to figure are the IT costs of a Web site and just what departments are responsible for what parts of it. If you want to find out how managers at leading-edge companies are making a case for investment and measuring returns on deploying emerging and rapidly evolving technologies to achieve strategic business goals across the enterprise be sure to hear her presentation in San Francisco. ================================================== Get your free, four-week trial to Cutter Consortium's Each week, Editor Paul Harmon examines shifts in the e-business Register for your free trial at: Kate Fessenden is a Research Director of Enterprise XML for the Aberdeen Group. She has eighteen years experience in marketing, market research and consulting in the high tech industry. Kate is going to discuss the current state of XML and its impact on e-business Integration and EDI. XML (Extensible Markup Language) is the standard commerce language of the Web and has progressed significantly over the past year. It holds the promise of being far more important to how data will be handled and managed across the entire enterprise and the extended supply chain. XML will impact nearly every organization within a corporation. Kate's talk will center XML HAS REJUVINATED EDI XML has given EDI a new lease on life by enabling it for general e-commerce. EDI was dying, but it will probably continue to exist long into the future because of XML. EDI can now be used for interactive, collaborative commerce on the Web and gives small and medium sized enterprises access into the once exclusive EDI domains and the e-commerce world. EDI is expensive and needs a lot of support which limited its use to about 300,000 enterprise users, all big companies. In early e-commerce transactions, companies without access to EDI found what they needed online, then bought it offline. Next came the virtual trading communities bringing buyers and sellers with common needs together. The next stage is collaborative commerce which adds support for other business process before, during and after the order. EDI hasn't exactly been leading the charge for any of this. DISA, who controls EDI, hasn't bothered to do anything with XML standards for two years so the vendors are taking the initiative. The X12 Standard Table Data has been XML-ized by vendors and they provide seamless conversion of data from EDI to XML now. Each vendor has done it differently, but there are a number of solutions out there. NEW INITIATIVES IN DIRECT MATERIALS PROCUREMENT Kate told me that one new issue is direct materials procurement on the Web, which is moving along right now. Not everything is automated yet but it is very close to coming of age and could go online in just a few months. EDI will be truly interactive. Some issues will take longer depending on the industry segment, but automotive, transportation and aerospace are leaders. The supply and demand chains are being integrated, making the whole process more seamless and easier to implement. Truckers and some rail shippers have their own dialect now, and this will have a trickle down effect on all of transportation and the oil and gas industries as well. Automating materials procurement means all the factors involved in getting materials have to be included. This means banks have to be involved along with insurance and all the logistics people. All of them have to have their part automated. EDI IS NOW INTERACTIVE The big thing here is that you can now do interactive transactions with EDI. No longer does the processing have to be done in batch mode at night when there is less traffic. Managers and executives need to understand that tremendous savings are possible here. Kate said that some companies are paying 20 million dollars a year in VAN fees. If you put this on the Internet with XML-ized EDI the transaction costs plummet. Some EDI transactions costs are as much as $100 to $200 each. The documentation on an aerospace order could be inches thick and very expensive to squeeze through a VAN at night. On the Internet this transaction is just another big file and would cost less than a dollar. Right now it can be done in near real-time and soon in real-time. Kate thinks that the compression technologies can take care of XML's reputation for being slow. Collaborative commerce is working here and there is great promise for the future. In this case, the future is a little later this year. Be sure to hear Kate's presentation in San Francisco.
==================================================== eBusiness Integration Conference Series
BrainStorm Group Seminars: Business Process Integration Mobile
Enterprise Strategies ==================================================== The eBusiness Bulletin is a service of the BrainStorm Group eBusiness Integration Conference Series and the eBusiness Strategy Conference Series, Northboro, Massachusetts: Contact Information:
==================================================== If you have been forwarded this newsletter from someone else, please sign up to receive your own copy. Send an email to subscribe@brainstorm-group.com with the word SUBSCRIBE in the subject line. Copyright 2001 The BrainStorm Group, Inc. Rights are granted to forward this newsletter via email to others on an individual basis as long as it is forwarded in its entirety. To unsubscribe an email to
unsubscribe@brainstorm-group.com with
UNSUBSCRIBE in the subject
line. Return
to Newsletter Index |