A common collaborative platform- Will it deliver?

Collaboration- key corporate strategy?

There seems to be lot of anticipation and electricity in the enterprise air

all over the world as enterprise application architects with software giants,

independent think-tanks, big research organizations, all debating and working

towards a very new and exciting concept-"The Next Generation

Application."

There is lot of buzz around Collaboration, Collaborative Enterprise, Adaptive

Business Networks and Collaborative Supply Chains Management and so on. There

are projective statements about the definite emergence of portals and someone

pioneers with Integration of diverse generation applications through a single

platform.






Isn’t this a bit confusing even to us, the ‘Know-all-about-IT" guys who
implement IT-solutions for the enterprises? On the other hand, do we detect some

intelligent pattern in this madness? There are observers and analysts, who say

that there is a pattern, a very strong one, indicating a paradigm shift in

Enterprise Application Architecture.

The Enterprise Applications span from mainframe-applications

to recent three-tier-client-server architecture. The early enterprise

applications finally matured into robust and modular ERP encompassing all the

operational areas of the enterprise. It offered tight integration among all the

business processes of the enterprise, eliminated data redundancy, made available

on-line, real-time data updation and extensive up-to-date analytics coupled with

projections.

The ERP extended into two opposite directions of SCM and CRM,

thus furthering the reach of enterprise to manage its suppliers and customers.

The suppliers and customers were now on a common EDI platform with the

enterprise, where required information can be exchanged as per the needs and

through proper processes. But there was no process visibility, no information

sharing and no collaboration.

The Natural Collaboration

The evangelists went hyperactive at this stage when they sensed the lack of

natural collaboration among the business partners and this induced the

architects to introduce the most natural thing to happen to the world of IT in

many years-Collaboration.

The business transactions taking place between the various

business partners aim towards a common goal. So the moot point here if the

partners are striving for a win-win situation through their business with each

other, why then the business processes are not integrated and visible enough to

aid one another? This was the question asked time and again and answered finally

by incorporating collaborative solutions.

Peter Drucker, the Management Guru, claims that demographics,

technology and globalization — the three driving forces of today’s society

& economy — will make collaboration, alliances and partnerships the most

important area of corporate strategy in near future.

Gartner Group, the consulting giant, supports this view and

projects that collaborative commerce initiatives involving web-enabled

interaction between enterprises, their customers, trading partners and employees

will now be the top business priority and by 2005 almost half of the

Web-initiatives will be Collaborative.

It's now clear that collaboration among business partners holds the key to

shortening of business cycles, reducing overall costs and thus creating a

win-win situation for all partners. Efficiency enters the collaborative entity

by avoiding wastage of time and efforts.

With real time collaboration, process visibility & information visibility

increases to a great extent. This negates the use of many

manual-intervention-based information exchange methods like email, phone, fax,

thus avoiding the time lag and efforts involved, leading to direct increase in

efficiency and reduction in costs.

Adaptation of such collaborative solutions by different

business partners like suppliers, enterprise and customers in a supply chain

kind of scenario, need to have a radical and lateral thinking approach.

They must be open to exchange ideas and information with

their partners, trust each other and be able to realize that all the partners in

a particular business network have a common business goal.

We know that this kind of implementation necessitates

detailed planning covering many aspects of Business Process Re-engineering (BPR)

and Change Management. In addition, the next and most important issue to be

tackled is that of the costs involved. For the enterprises that already are into

ERPs, this may not be a limiting factor as they have their high-power network in

place. However, it may be a deciding factor for their smaller partners who are

on their legacy applications. Will they be enamored enough to go for extensive

networking infrastructure? This is the debatable point and doesn’t have any

ready answers.

Will the new collaborative wave stop here? It seems not,

considering the exciting happenings in application arena. AMR Research had

hinted about it in a recent research involving Collaborative Supply Chains and

SAP has taken a step towards it by introducing NetWeaver.

The Next Generation Application

A new ‘Application on Applications’ is emerging and it

appears to be a common collaboration platform for different applications, which

may be with the same or different organizations, developed on same or different

software platforms and from same or different generations.

This may be the thing, which can serve as Next Generation

Application Architecture. The idea is radically different in the sense that it

does not interfere with the existing application instead will interface with all

of them through a common platform, which will act as a GUI for all of them.






All applications will be available on the platform, all applications can be
operated through the platform and information can be seamlessly exchanged

through the same platform. Isn’t this amazing? It is amazing if it really

works as it appears to work and if it is accepted by organizations.

This kind of application architecture is the future of

information exchange & processing within and outside the enterprise. This

will help satisfy the most critical aspect of new application development and

implementation cost. This kind of collaboration platform can integrate and

collaborate any number of applications from any organizations at will. No

lengthy BPR projects, no Change Management issues, no exorbitant infrastructure upgradation,

no repeated training cycles and so no budget overruns. This can create an

on-demand, real-time collaborative, business group that is an end-to-end

cohesive entity ready to respond to market dynamics efficiently.

I can quote some pretty impressive names here, like Forrester

Research, Syntegra, Leverent Consulting, Gartner Group, Aberdeen Group, The

Stencil Group and of course SAP, who are endorsing the basic underlying theme of

this new architecture and projecting that we are moving towards a new

collaborative application era.n






Let us see how this new generation application architecture emerges, takes
shape, matures and satisfies the expectations.