| ------------------------------------- BrainStorm Bulletin e-newsletter of BrainStorm Group October 23, 2003 -------------------------------------
==================================================== -- INTRODUCTION: ==================================================== In this issue we will preview four featured presentations, which will be given during our upcoming New York conferences - including two case studies, a very important panel discussion and a keynote address. Make plans to join us at BrainStorm New York, November 4-6 to hear these and many other presentations in person! BPM Keynote: The Migration Path to Services Oriented Architecture (Business Integration and Web Services Conference) - Janelle Hill with the META Group will talk about how Business Process Management, once referred to as workflow or process automation, has evolved into a suite of inter-related, standards-based components. This technology will transition current applications to Web services, increasing business integration and agility. Read about Janelle's presentation below. Case Study: A Framework for Business Process Architecture. (Business Integration and Web Services Conference) Brett Champlin from Allstate Insurance will present an approach that defines all of the parts of an organization's process management efforts in a structured framework, which can be used to build a repository to organize, navigate, measure, and manage a business's process information assets, and can also be used as a roadmap for strategy and management of the whole business process environment. Read about Brett's presentation below. Case Study: Outsourcing- Knowledge Networks. (Nearshore/Offshore Outsourcing Conference) Michael Floyd will report on how KN increased their ROI by a factor of four and cut costs in half when they outsourced their software development to Birlasoft in India. Michael covers what worked and what didn't with this outsourcing project. Read about how Michael got a lot more by spending less below. Panel: Sarbanes-Oxley - Achieving Regulatory Compliance. (Business Intelligence Seminar) We don't usually cover panel discussions in our pre-conference coverage, but this is a notable exception. NOT complying with Sarbanes-Oxley could significantly affect your life for the next 3 to 5 years. Heavy fines and even jail time is a distinct possibility. If you hold a position in IT or in the management of a public company, you need to hear this panel discussion. Ron Powell, Publisher and Editorial Director of the DM Review will moderate the panel. Read what he has to say below. BrainStorm features one-on-one sessions with the top industry leaders, analysts, experts, authors and providers to give you the latest technological and business advice for your organization. Go to www.BrainStorm-Group.com to register for New York. Lets talk in New York. Best Regards,
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| ================================================= Brett Champlin leads business and IT process redesign projects for Allstate. He led the development of an enterprise process model repository and the selection of the enterprise process modeling, analysis and design tools. He has over 20 years of experience working in IT systems and management. In New York, Brett will present an approach to defining all of the parts of an enterprise’s process management environment in a structured framework. This framework can be used to build a repository to organize, navigate, measure, and manage a business’s process information assets. The framework also can be used as a roadmap for strategy and management of the whole business process environment. Brett told me he has worked with business process architectures for a long time and has seen medium and large companies end up with hundreds of process models made with different tools using different standards and notations. They usually are lost or ignored and seldom used. Many definitions of business process models exist, depending on what they are used for and which business unit created them. A high-level business analyst will produce a different process model than a systems analyst. A framework for business processes defines terms and creates a perspective for people to see the models, what processes they address, and how they work. This gives everyone a common frame of reference and a common terminology to see how all the processes can work together. The framework aligns and organizes business processes and the underlying IT systems that support them and includes all the models, artifacts, documentation, and information. Brett described his framework as a design model for a process architecture repository. After this process repository exists, business processes can be seen, analyzed, and linked together to provide information that couldn’t be accessed before, giving much needed insight into what the business is doing and where it should go. Brett said, “Basically the idea is to create a blueprint of your business process architecture that shows what business processes you have. If we have a framework that starts at a very high level and puts everything into the enterprise context, what the major core processes are, and what are the support and control processes and how we address and map things to them, we can see, recognize, and replicate the best practices, getting value from them.” Brett said that while there is no “one-size-fits-all” solution, his talk will cover an approach to developing a framework that ensures that all bases are covered and all business needs met. Brett added that this is more a business process than a system process. Coming from the IT side, he has moved to the business side because his job is to bridge the gap between the two. Brett isn’t going to delve into the technical details of how this framework is built. He said that, in his experience, as soon as he begins talking about the technical side, the business-side people stop listening. That’s a problem because they are the ones who need this information most. His goal is to structure a framework that starts with the end in mind, along with the company’s direction and goals. There are dozens of different ends, but the idea is to set the goal and decide what to do, which then determines the framework. How you set it up will either help or hinder you, so a lot of thought needs to go into the framework creation and organization. The result is a business process framework where everyone speaks the same language. It is a tool for better understanding and communication. More importantly, it can be used as a roadmap for strategy and management of the whole business process environment. Come to New York and find out how a framework for business processes can help your company. Jon Huntress ================================================= Register for BrainStorm New York (November 4-6) today to schedule your One-on-One Meetings*! BrainStorm New York features 4 events in one location:
Complete program information
for all 4 events is included in the brochure (takes a moment to load):
http://www.brainstorm-group.com/ny/brochure03.pdf * Practitioners and event sponsors will be given preference on scheduling meetings. The numbers of meetings are limited and based on a first come basis. ================================================= Janelle B. Hill is the Program Director for Integration and Development Practice at the META Group. She has over 20 years of IT experience and is an industry expert on software infrastructure. She has held both technical and management roles in software architecture, database development, IT operations, and product marketing and sales. As lead middleware analyst for MetaGroup, she advises user and vendor clients on the evaluation, selection and implementation of middleware products such as EAI, BPM Suites, and Application Servers, market trends, competitor analysis, Web services standards and trends, SOA best practices, and strategies for building an adaptive infrastructure to enable business agility. Business Process Management (BPM) was once referred to as workflow or process automation. Now it has evolved into a suite of inter-related, standards-based components. This rapidly evolving set of technologies is the primary vehicle by which current application portfolios will transition to Services Oriented Architecture based on Web services, paving the way to increased business integration and agility and providing significant business value. Janelle told me her talk would be a fairly technical discussion that covers technology migration used to integrate disparate applications both within and outside the firewall. Until lately, the applications that do this have been fairly proprietary. Now the technology is becoming a standards-based stack that is merging with what was previously considered as human workflow and document management, which were separate silos. She will discuss the market trends of this converged stack of technology now called Business Process Management Suites, and why it is a critical piece of technology to help user organizations migrate their existing applications portfolios to Web services oriented application architectures to increase flexibility in their applications and enable the business to become more adaptive. Janelle told me these suites are available from most vendors now. They all appear to be standards-based and look much alike on paper. Janelle said that we are so early into this market that the mix is still 90% vendors and 10% buyers. The greater part of the market is waiting to see if there is a shake-out or a direction that will make the choice easier. According to Janelle, this is a big mistake. As difficult as it is to pick a trend or a winning package, the bigger mistake is not doing anything. "You can't really wait," Janelle said. "You have to pick somebody's. If you want to start migrating your application portfolio it doesn't really matter whose technology you pick. What matters is that you begin the migration." Open standards ensures that even if your vendor choice goes belly up in two years, most of what you have done can be migrated elsewhere. "The most important thing about my talk is that it will provide guidance to users on the migration path towards Web services, standards-based application architecture," she said, adding that she will also share the best practices for the path and show what others are doing, including Web services adoption trends and patterns. She will also give her insights into handicapping the vendors, giving attendees the best bets for making a good vendor selection. Her talk is for end users and CIOs, IT architects and anyone doing infrastructure planning and design, along with anyone doing a major application project, such as ERP conversions. Janelle said this adoption process will take from three to five years, and will give the early adopters a significant market advantage. Make plans to be in New York and hear Janelle's talk. You can register for this and the other BrainStorm conferences and seminars by logging onto www.BrainStorm-group.com. Jon Huntress ================================================= Intalio, The Business Process Management Company, is a leading provider of business process management systems that help Global 2,000 firms become process-managed organizations by extending business process models into executable and manageable processes that can be directly deployed on existing IT assets and seamlessly directed by business users. Intalio Facts Mission: To empower Global 2,000 firms to become process-managed organizations. Product: Intalio|n³ is the only standards-based and platform-neutral Business Process Management System (BPMS) that enables best-in-class business processes to be extended into executable and manageable processes that can be directly deployed onto existing IT assets and seamlessly directed by business users. Leadership: Created the Business
Process Management Initiative (BPMI.org). ================================================= Overview: Knowledge Networks is a consumer information company that does opinion surveys. The IT department had a difficult time fulfilling the business needs of the company. Michel Floyd came in and suggested outsourcing most of the software development and Birlasoft in India was the chosen vendor. Since then, ROI has quadrupled and costs have been cut in half. The reputation of the IT department has gone from the cellar to the executive suite. Michel covers what worked and what didn't with this outsourcing project. Knowledge Networks conducts opinion research for corporations, academia, and the government. It has built a nationally representative panel of nearly 40,000 Americans who are surveyed online weekly on various topics. KN also has a call center for conducting phone surveys and runs a national "shopper lab" to collect shopper data on 2M households. KN applications are mostly Web-based and cover workflow, project management, survey management, data warehousing and other applications. A few legacy Windows and client-server applications are also maintained by the offshore team. Michel Floyd is responsible for all custom software development and information technology, as well as online operations for KN's statistically representative panel of US households. He is an expert in distributed computing, high availability Web applications, eCommerce, networking, and enterprise software. Michel told me his company has about 200 employees, and software development has never been a core focus - they develop software to serve the needs of the business. In 2001, there were about 20 people on the engineering team, and there was a lot of dissatisfaction, both on the team and within the company. IT was spending a lot of money and not delivering applications that met the business needs. Michel was called in to improve the situation and recommended an offshore approach. KN ended up giving the contract to Birlasoft to handle all of KN software development projects. They also decided to standardize the infrastructure around Microsoft tools. The most experienced and "customer-friendly" KN engineers were kept to form a senior leader core with the best historical knowledge of the legacy applications and overall view of the business. They serve as the senior architects and project managers, and deal directly with the business managers. A senior Birlasoft consultant who was instrumental in getting the relationship started was also included in this team. All the software coding and testing was sent to India. The hardest part of making this all work was for KN to develop a disciplined requirements management process. Before 2001, IT waited for the business stakeholders to give them the requirements, which the business-side people did not have the time or skills to do. Now the senior architects along with the stakeholders identify the requirements, document then in Rational RequisitePro, and then share them with India. Most ad-hoc communication occurs via email and chat sessions during evening hours in California (working hours in India). The phones are seldom used, but there are semi-annual site visits. Michel said the hardest thing about getting the outsourcing relationship going was teaching Birlasoft about KN's business, including terminology and the way they do their work, the kind of applications they build and getting Birlasoft to develop good Web applications. Once they shifted over to .NET, they found getting the deployments out much easier and faster, with deployment times down from eight hours to about two hours. The results are that the engineering budget was reduced by 60% while the value of the output increased by three or four times. The productivity of Knowledge Network's operations team was boosted by 90% because of the improved workflow and survey management systems. There were problems. Some of the MS-Exchange-based workflow features couldn't be made to work and were abandoned. There were bandwidth problems in India and the offshore team suffered from high turnover. The senior KN staff also had to do a lot of teaching. Michel said that this outsourcing project wasn't all that technical in nature. Business process owners, software development managers, and anyone considering outsourcing would benefit from hearing this case study. Michel said KN has succeeded in doing more with less, and in doing so, changed the way the company looks at their department. "The whole team was not a winning one before, and had a hard time putting the ball in the end zone. Now the CEO talks about us glowingly." If you are considering an offshore deployment, you should hear this case study. Log onto www.BrainStorm-Group.com and sign up for our New York conference. Jon Huntress ================================================= Are you looking for ways to maintain the competitive advantage through new service offerings and managing the existing ones, at the same time keeping your costs low and passing the savings to your clients? At XIM we help our customers prepare and deliver solutions that match their requirements and the needs of their clients by matching our on- and offshore engineering staff with local industry Subject Matter Experts (SME’s). Since 1994 XIM Inc., a CA-based IT Consulting and Management Company has been providing Application Development, Integration, Testing, Project Management and Recruiting services to companies like Nokia, Openwave, Charles Schwab, Ask Jeeves, Fast Search and others. We have made our business to provide value and services to enterprises that expect on-time delivery, reasonable costs and only the highest quality. We specialize in:
If you would like
to learn more how we can help you with your IT projects, please visit
our website www.ximxim.com
, email us at contact@ximxim.com
or call (866) 634-0403. You can also visit us at the display booth at
the BrainStorm Nearshore & Offshore Conference in New York November
4-5. ================================================= Panel: Sarbanes-Oxley
– Achieving Regulatory Compliance Ron Powell has an extensive technology background with more than 20 years of experience in the field as a CEO, COO, consultant, manager and editor. He has been the publisher/editorial director of DM Review since July of 1993. The need for comprehensive financial reporting is more urgent and demanding than ever before because of Sarbanes-Oxley. The panelists will address key issues in adapting financial information systems to the requirements of the new regulations through BPM applications, analytics, and internal/external reporting mechanisms. Panelists will include representatives from Fuego, Hyperion and iWay. We don't normally give advanced coverage on our conference panel discussion, but are making an exception this time because of the importance of Sarbanes-Oxley. The deadline for complying with this legislation is coming soon, and the consequences for non-compliance can be extreme. We are talking big fines and even jail time here-- doing the dreaded perp walk on TV. Ron Powell is moderating the panel, and the first question I asked him was, "Could you give me an overview of why it is important for people to meet their obligations with regards to this law?" He replied, "First of all, the penalties associated with not being able to provide the information required by the government, if you are not able to come up with information that is being requested or justify the statements that you made to the public, then there are criminal penalties which could result in many consequences including going to prison." Ron said the reporting requirements required for compliance have been changed. Now you need to have access to seven years of data instead of three. Companies need to have the ability to drill back and support all public statements made regarding the company. Ron said this is a tremendous liability and some companies are even thinking of going private because they can't conform. "There have already been some judgments against companies. The Wall Street Journal has published stories on a couple of companies that have had their executives sentenced to heavy fines and I believe even some jail time. The purpose of the panel is to have the panel members discuss what they have been doing with regards to Sarbanes-Oxley and why it is important and that it can be done. Some people are afraid, but there are ways to get this done that don't require a phenomenal investment. I think a lot of executives feel that the effort required is beyond their budgetary constraints." I asked him if there was still a lot of "head-in-the-sand" thinking about compliance and he said there is, but added, "There is still time to become compliant." Ron told me the panel will cover the IT implications too. "The other thing we will talk about is business performance management with Sarbanes-Oxley. What it really amounts to, is that once you get into the process where they are asking you about public statements made about the company, the ability to have a BPM systems to help answer the initial questions is the bridge between the data and the inquiring agency. Our panelists will address these areas." IT people who are responsible for data integration within the enterprise should attend this panel. They need to know and understand the requirements in order to support the executives in their organizations. Others who should attend include anyone who needs to understand the business implications of Sarbanes-Oxley. This would include middle-managers as well as all C-level executives. Avoid embarrassing perp-walks! Come to New York and find out what you need to know about becoming compliant to Sarbanes-Oxley. You can register for the conference by going to www.BrainStorm-Group.com. Jon Huntress |
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