Why a Business Architecture?

The main goal of a Business Architecture is to enable the business to improve customer service quality through a better transparency, flexibility and adaptability of business operations. The market environment changes more rapidly and the use of technology by customers dramatically influences how a business can operate. Financial services calculation processes, marketing programs, business rules and content change already weekly rather than monthly.

However, if a business architecture has to be modelled, encoded and assembled by using a large number of tools and software components it cannot provide the benefits. Today’s heavily fragmented and hardcoding-integrated IT systems (including SOA) are too rigid to enable rapidly changing business environments. Most IT departments do not focus on adaptability and innovation because they have been requested to focus on lowering cost and system stability. Therefore, six month rollout cycles are the norm with three month being the exception. Business users expectations of stability and executive demands for lower cost are incompatible with the ability to achieve a flexble and adaptive, competitive IT infrastructure. Efficiency is still the main IT goal, with effectiveness a far-off second and agility being no more than an overused buzzword.

Combine this with the misconception that running a business can be pre-planned and therefore encoded into processes and rules, with decisions being taken by predictive analysis based on historical (or better outdated?) business data. I propose that good business decisions are always taken by experienced people who use intuition to combine relevant data in business context. After billions of IT investments neither process management nor business intelligence have delivered the promised wonderland of the automated enterprise that the board can run remotely from the beach. Why?

Neither BPM nor BI consider the human side of running a business and therefore fail to produce a nimble, agile organization. Based on unproven management theories and over-optimistic information technology benefit claims a huge IT bureaucracy is now necessary to manage a complex technology stack. Control and use of the technology stack is only feasable through outsourcing partners and the necessary complex contracts reduce corporate agility even more. Billions are spent by the IT monopolists for marketing to sell an illusion of the IT-controlled business that does not exist and is not achievable by the proposed complex means.

The above situation was the reason for ISIS Papyrus to develop a new IT platform that does not require a huge technology stack and does not need complex programming but a simple modeling and rule definition methodology to build a flexible and adaptible Business Architecture that is mostly under the control of the business and not the IT department.

Agility AND innovation happen on the people level. BPM and SixSigma trash out the people empowerment slogan but fail to deliver because in neither approach people are given the freedom to do things as they see fit as long as the goals are achieved. Enterprise 2.0 is a countermovement to the bureaucratic IT-Governance approach, but if it is simply putting Web 2.0 behind the firewall without giving the user access to plausible business data entities there is not such thing as empowerment.

William of Ockham wrote in Numquam ponenda est pluralitas sine necessitate: “The explanation of any phenomenon should make as few assumptions as possible and not invent further entities to explain a theory.” He was a friar and felt that the one entity of God would explain everything. Bertrand Russel translated it to: “The simplest explanation is usually the best.” Translated further to IT means that coded software systems or process solutions that require substantial resources to be model a business and even more to then adapt it to changing needs make things more complex than necessary. Flexibility AND adaptability by the user – while ensuring transparency and maintainability – are the key capabilities of modern systems. SixSigma adds a lot of bureaucratic complexity that is certainly not in line with Occam’s Razor. Let’s simplify …

A detailed description of Business Architecture features of the Papyrus Platform you will on my Papyrus Architecture blog.

Business Intelligence 2.0

So you thought the beginning and end of BI is the setting up of a cutting edge Data Warehouse? Well, think again. The BI landscape has undergone a sea change. Trying to articulate its various aspects and how it is evolving would fill several books. In this article, we will skim the surface and talk about the various ways in which BI is being perceived and handled in the current IT landscape.

If   Traditional BI = Data Warehouse + Reporting Tools

Then

BI 2.0 = (Past + Present) Data/Analytics + Future Business Analytics + Reporting Tools

I have used this simple equation by way of demonstration:  BI v2.0 is all about studying and analyzing Past, Present and Future trends using archived and real-time data feeds and then turning this data into knowledge for stronger decision-making.

It is real-time or it is of no real use:

When it comes to Traditional BI tools, the data retrieved from them, in today’s parlance, is considered outdated. Intelligence is gleaned after the fact—after significant time has elapsed between the actual activity and the time when it is analyzed in either an individual or aggregated fashion. In this Internet Age, even the lapse of a day could render that data obsolete.

BAM and CEP are real-time tools; data is analyzed as the transactions are being executed. It is this optimally effective decision-making in the moment that makes BI 2.0 so attractive to new age businesses.

Use Case:

Let us now look at a common use case: the Shopping Cart. Shopping on the web is one of the most common online transactional activities today, and it is increasing year over year. For high traffic sites like eBay and Amazon, business cannot be made truly agile without the use of real-time analytics. Traditional BI just will not suffice.

So let us consider the following example:

Acme Mart is a medium-sized discount store with brick and mortar stores throughout the country.
It also sells merchandise through its high traffic website acmediscountstore.com.
The transaction volumes both at the stores and online is quite large—to the extent of several million per day.
It has a mature, established SOA infrastructure and its entire order management process is service-enabled.

Acme Mart also uses BAM (Business Activity Monitoring) to monitor services. Custom dashboards have been built to monitor sales of specific item categories and even items through sophisticated dashboards.

Contrast this with a similar business that uses Traditional BI mechanisms. It is obvious that it will not be able to match the level of agility of Acme Mart. By the time the sales data is analyzed, the opportunity to respond proactively has passed. Acme Mart is clearly more capable of reducing costs and increasing revenues via its real-time BAM-enabled BI solutions.

While CEP (Complex Event Processing) is similar to BAM, it is more of a services agnostic technology. It is sort of a real-time message aggregator that can process messages from various different sources including web services. One example of this can be applied to the current use case,  along with order information, if related stock price information for the companies that produce those products are also needed in a separate dashboard then this feed that would normally come from the likes of a Bloomberg or Reuters can be combined with this Order data and displayed.

BI Technology Trends:  The Past

We need not go into the details of how BI functions were being performed or are still being approached using DW-driven technology. If Business needed insights into key trends then they would follow this well beaten path:

-          Setup a de-normalized DW or Data Mart

-          ETL information from transactional data stores into DW

-          Use reporting tools like Cognos to generate the required MIS reports.

Therefore, this was the tried and trusted method and was considered business as usual. Traditional BI is very batch-oriented in nature and not real-time. However, while real-time mechanisms may look very compelling in terms of their value proposition and ROI, it may not be feasible to implement these quickly as they are dependent on a services-based infrastructure.

BI Technology Trends:  The Present

As the competitive landscape becomes more intense, the need for real-time business intelligence is almost De Rigueur in certain types of industries, in order to gain business agility and competitive advantage. With the advent of technologies such as BAM and CEP, it is possible to perform real-time and even future what if business analytics.

BAM and CEP fall under a new category called Event Driven Architecture (EDA). These tools permit BI in both synchronous and asynchronous modes.

Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) is associated mainly with Web Services. It is a dashboard driven toolset that is comprised of various design time components and a runtime component. It is used in conjunction with other runtime components of a typical SOA implementation, such as ESBs and BPEL engines.

CEP (Complex Event Processing) is similar to BAM with the difference that CEP is not tied to web services alone and is message agnostic. You can aggregate disparate messages from myriad sources and use them as part of one CEP application.CEP is usually event driven.

The online shopping segment is also benefitting a lot from these advanced BI solutions paradigms. The likes of Amazon, eBay and Zappos are rejoicing at the arrival of BAM and CEP. In such high traffic sites where the hits are measured in millions per day, attaining the level of agility and edge over the competition is virtually impossible without real-time analytics. Traditional BI strategies fall woefully short and are not equipped to deal with these types of business operations.

BI Technology Trends:  The Future

There are several game changing trends that are in vogue in the BI field that promise to change the face of the industry. While BAM and CEP are the pre-cursors, they are fueling other paradigms that were not possible before.

Here is an example that is taken from advertising industry pundits whose central focus is always on “The Consumer”:  Smart Billboards that will glean biometric information based on facial features of anyone walking by. If the consumer turns out to be a young 20-something year old male, the backend system would beam back relevant information such as ads for an iPod, cell phone, energy drink, sports car or anything that fits this particular demographic.

Just 5 years ago, this idea would have seemed outlandish, but not anymore. With real-time BI delivery mechanisms at the foundation, scenarios such as this are becoming reality. With a little ingenuity and BI 2.0, the possibilities are seemingly endless.

Netflix- Sr. Business Systems Analyst

The Business systems analyst will be working with Finance department and Engineers in the Applications development and Business intelligence teams. At High level the analyst will be responsible for analyzing the business needs of the Finance / Operations team and stakeholders to help identify the business problems formulate and scope the process and partner with engineering team to provide solutions. Employee must act as the liaison between the business side of the Netflix and the providers of services to the enterprise. Employee must have a good understanding of Procure2Pay,Order management, financial reporting and IT standards. Fixed Assets, financials (GL/AP/AR/CM/FA) would be an advantage. Devices and modifies the procedures to solve complex business problems considering system capacity , systems limitations, operating time and desired needs of the user. Competent to work at the highest technical level of most phases on systems analysis, while conducting the business implications of information technology, as applied to current and future business needs.
Responsibilities include but not limited to:

Provide guidance to stakeholders on devising effective and efficient approaches to achieve the project objectives and improve business process.
Develops documentation of business and user needs, and systems requirement specifications.
Set up and configure Oracle E-business suite 11i P2P, FND, AR, AP,GL,FA, Cash management, Workflow modules & Oracle Alerts
Accounting hierarchy set ups, document and reconcile accounting entries from GL to sub ledgers.
Act as the functional expert and work with engineering team to implement interfaces to oracle ERP via standard interfaces as well as adapters.
Develop report specifications.
Prepares and drives work project plans.
Participates in design, acceptance testing, and implementation of information systems.
Experience & Competencies:

Required:

8+ knowledge in Oracle E-Business suite and at least 2 years of that in version 11.5.10
Strong accounting expertise with accruals, depreciation, amortization, IFRS functionality.
Strong understanding of Oracle Applications structure, interfaces and using SQL to navigate through the data.
Has worked with Multi Org, Multi currency set ups.
5+ years of knowledge and experience in general business practices and procedures.
5+ years of knowledge and experience in the use of techniques for business process analysis and systems design.
Strong knowledge of Procure2Pay, GL, Cash management Fixed assets.
Strong understanding of financial reporting and Enterprise planning and budgeting.
Ability to read, analyze and interpret general business periodicals, professional journals or technical procedures.
Ability to write reports, business correspondence and procedure manuals.
Ability to effectively present information and respond to questions from managers, clients, engineers and customers.
Ability to think logically in solving problems and to present recommendations in a clear & concise form.
Nice To Have:

Oracle FSG Reports and ADI.
Oracle Applications R12.
Good knowledge of working with Fusion Middleware, BPEL processes etc.
Education:

CPA / MBA (Finance) or equivalent.

Characteristics of Success at Netflix:

Strong customer orientation, both internally and externally.
Strategic thinking both technically and business wise.
Ability to execute successfully on business strategy.
Flexibility to shift priorities based on changing business needs
Self motivated, curious, responsible and flexible
Desire to work in a fast paced, evolving & dynamic environment.
Ability to work in a team environment without letting your ego get in the way.
High level of integrity and ethics.
For quick consideration