Crouching Changes, Hidden Opportunities

Bhushan Y Nigale, Developer, SAP Labs

Every age has a technology of it’s own. One of the greatest hallmarks of our civilization has been the creation and employment of technology. In a broad sense, technology is the expression of the culture in which it is created and harbored. Just like how the underlying cultures are dynamic, technologies too undergo a similar metamorphosis: the form and nature of evolution directed by the changing needs of those who seek to employ them.

What drives these technological changes? Surely constant human innovation is one primary factor. Equally important is the changing needs of businesses that employ technology. Business environment changes due to a variety of reasons, such as new partnerships, new economic policies and rules.

Any enterprise software system should be able to respond and adapt to the ever-changing environment in which it operates, an environment that is in a state of continual flux. If an enterprise does not keep pace with the technological advancements, then the software system it employs runs a severe risk of non-interoperability with other enterprise software systems.

Enterprises for long have reaped the benefits of both departmental and company-wide process efficiencies delivered by enterprise software. The focus is now increasingly shifting towards garnering efficiencies across their entire eco-systems, spanning business partners, suppliers and subsidiaries.

This assumes special relevance in today’s difficult economic conditions: enterprises are rightly demanding both a higher ROI from and lower TCO for their IT systems. The message is loud and clear: enterprise software should open up to meet the challenge posed by collaboration. The functionalities hitherto locked in enterprise software should be able to cross system boundaries: no enterprise is an island.

The Three Aspects of Enterprise Integration

Consider the example of the launch of a new automobile, a complex process involving a multitude of people and processes. Aided by an extensive market research — conducted across several market segments — the product planners draft the initial specifications of the vehicle. In what is a highly iterative process, Auto-Designers create the final model. Manufacturing then steps in: several of the hundreds of the individual components that are manufactured, outsourced for production or purchased from suppliers are assembled together and the vehicle is rolled out. Simultaneously, at this stage the dealer network and corporate websites are updated to announce the launch of the vehicle.

A large number of IT systems and teams — most of them situated across different geographical locations — are involved in the launch. The entire product launch scenario has transcended system and organization boundaries as it moves from one end of the value chain (with just automobile concept in mind to start with) to the other (with the final product ready for the launch).

For reasons of efficiency and productivity, clearly integration and collaboration between multiple systems is required.

Perhaps it would also be clear from the above example that such collaboration should address the three distinct (and yet interwoven) pillars of the enterprise: namely, People, Processes and Information. People manage the enterprise and drive core processes.

Processes define the enterprise and interact with people via information that is produced: information that is consumed by people to monitor and regulate the processes. No solution aimed at solving the problem of Enterprise Integration can afford to neglect these three pillars. The remainder of this article discusses how such a solution can be achieved.

Towards Enterprise Integration

An integration of multiple sub-systems also implies that there would be a manifold increase in the number of sources of information. Users — who are already complaining of information overload — would now have a fresh new set of IT systems to learn and cope with.

What is essential is that users need to be presented with a convenient, needs-based access for the information that is generated across the enterprise. Users need to have all the information that is essential for them to perform their jobs effectively and efficiently, to leverage their roles and responsibilities.

The Portal Technology is such a means that delivers unified, personalized and role-based access to the underlying heterogeneous IT system. Portals address the people collaboration aspect of enterprise integration: they present a single point of entry across all applications that a user needs to access.

Essentially, the aim is to provide the right functionality and right information to the right people at the right time. For instance, a plant manager need not have to navigate her way through a myriad of applications and user interfaces for obtaining a daily plant report. Instead, such a report consisting of say, daily production results, inventory status, and personnel availability can be obtained from a single window residing on her desk-top.

To enable such a unification of operations and the emergent simplified information access, the underlying heterogeneity of the business landscape needs to be mastered.

Heterogeneity in a business landscape stems from a multitude of reasons: different vendors, different components, different solutions on different platforms, different databases. To master heterogeneity, it is imperative that systems adhere to and adopt a common standard — preferably an open, so that adoption from multiple vendors is simplified - in order to ensure interoperability.

Thus what is required is a technology to model and drive business processes combining underlying applications. Such a process-level integration would then enable different systems to participate in collaborative business scenarios irrespective of their implementation platforms. One way to facilitate this is to make available the system functionality as a service. Other systems needing to interact with this system can then invoke this service.

Web Services make such a participative collaboration possible. Web Services encapsulate self-contained, modularized functionalities that can be discovered and accessed through a network, such as the WWW. The underlying implementation details are abstracted, systems simply need to know which Web Service to invoke and how.

It doesn’t matter whether the service is executing on a Mainframe situated in Alabama or on a desktop the floor above as long as the invokers know what parameters to send in and what to expect in return. Geography may not exactly be history yet, but the signs are telling.

Of course, providing services is not enough; information is also essential about what functionalities these services provide and how to use them. What is therefore warranted is an infrastructure that captures these shared process descriptions, managing the broad diversity of the landscape.

Sharing of business semantics also serves to eliminate redundancy: systems know exactly which systems to contact when a particular service is required, without having to implement that service. Just as in life, sharing becomes enriching to all those involved.

Such sharing is not without it’s perils, though. It now becomes vitally important that the integrity of the data — stemming from the expanse of the enterprise from multiple, disparate systems — should be preserved. Out-of-Sync, inconsistent data leads to erroneous information, in turn affecting decision-making.

Preferably, data needs to be centralized and consistent across the enterprise. And as the information sources multiply, single-point access to the harmonized content becomes quintessential. The benefits are many: users can manage and analyze information from end to end, thus covering every single aspect of the business. Monitoring and response to emergency situations now becomes simplified.

Current Scenario

Expectedly, Enterprise Software Providers have responded to the call of providing collaborative enterprise software aimed at lower TCO and higher ROI. SAP NetWeaver, for instance, is a comprehensive integration and application platform that enables complete business integration. The next generation of the mySAP technology, SAP NetWeaver achieves business integration at the level of people, business processes and information. IBM’s IBM WebSphere is another such software platform aimed at achieving enterprise integration.

Software has enabled Enterprises to gain strategic advantages, nurture growth and harness efficiencies. It has created opportunities hitherto unknown and helped Enterprises to overcome barriers previously considered insurmountable. And yet there is more. By unifying the power of different systems, by mastering the inherent diversity to foster synergies, Enterprise software aims to deliver more value to its users. Promising times thriving with opportunities beckon ahead.

(The views expressed here are those of the author's and CIOL doesn't necessarily subscribe to the same)