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encoded into processes and rules, with decisions being taken by predictive analysis based on historical (or better outdated?)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.

The Isis Papyrus Business Information Platform

In 2008 ISIS Papyrus celebrates 20 years of continued innovation. From its first forms design product in 1998 to its current Papyrus platform utilizing artificial intelligence for process management, ISIS Papyrus was always first in line to innovate. More than 2000 clients utilize ISIS Papyrus products worldwide for such strategic applications as managing the issuing and renewal of more than half of the United States credit cards. By far the largest percentage of all financial, insurance and telecom documents in the EU is produced by ISIS Papyrus software. The upcoming ISIS Papyrus V7 already delivers what vendors such as Microsoft, IBM and Oracle are announcing as “modeling strategy for process management”.
ISIS Papyrus – built on its Papyrus Objects integration architecture – delivers an open, as well as standards-enabling platform for business process management across Papyrus Inbound and Outbound, third-party and legacy applications. Papyrus is delivering pre-built business processes across ERP, CRM, ECM, as well as business intellligence and industry applications using a meta-object model, SOA-compatible and general messaging interfaces, and a powerful freely definable portal user interface. Inbound and Outbound document management is tightly integrated with the central Change Management repository. Additionally, business users are able to extend the object model with their own meta-data definitions, store it to the repository and have full upgrade protection across any future product versions.

“The Papyrus architecture solves the long-term managment problem of processes that are linked to multiple applications,” said Max J. Pucher, Chief Architect of ISIS Papyrus Software. “By not depending on late-to-the-market standards such as BPEL we can focus on true long-term and cross-platform compatibilty to give our customers the flexibility to make changes to the underlying applications as well as the processes without disrupting the business users.”

Using the Papyrus WebRepository customers can immediately use Papyrus’ existing business objects, interface services, process and business case samples and infrastructure components to define specific end-to-end process integrations with or without related documents. Using a proven reference architecture and reusable service interfaces, Papyrus WebRepository significantly reduces the time, cost and risk associated with implementing Service Oriented Architecture projects. Our common model approach for application integration provides the foundation for creating composite processes while ensuring long-term process durability. WebRepository allows customers to define processes and integrations with the same development efficiency, control and visibility that ISIS Papyrus employs for its own software systems and inhouse applications. The Papyrus WebRepository not only manages the modeling and deployment of how processes and services are utilized and how they relate, it further enables customers to run complete integration tests, and most of all ensures the rentention of process analysis as well as implementation knowledge.

Why not Business Process Execution Language (BPEL)?

While BPEL is a standard, it is common practice to utilize jBPEL (BPEL with Java) that is proprietary to each vendor. The software user has therefore the worst of BOTH worlds – it is outdated (because it is built on a standard) but it is still proprietary. Each software vendor adds complex service links as API’s and SOA interfaces to make the integration with their own tools easy and reduce the cost to deploy and maintain integration. That makes the process implementation completely proprietary!

Even though a Papyrus System installation and document design does NOT require Java or C++ programming, customers do expect and receive a complete analysis, training and implementation service package. ISIS has experienced consultants in every major country.

We at ISIS Papyrus understand the challenges large corporations face to manage processes and to produce, manage and distribute personalised, data-driven and process related customer communication to remain competitive in today’s market. ISIS consultants analyse the corporations unique communication goals and then provide the tools and expertise necessary to produce high volume, personalised paper and electronic communication that significantly improve customer and prospect responses as well as client satisfaction.

The ISIS Papyrus Solution Spectrum

* CRM, ECM and BPM processes in a consolidated environment

* Client Response Management, Front-to-Back office processes, complaint Handling

* Account opening, claims handling, case management, call center management

* Automated correspondence, client reporting, utility and telecom billing

* SOA-enabled, process-focused integration into portal applications

* Interactive client communication for financial and insurance companies

* Internet document distribution and presentation in HTML/GIF, Java, AFP, PDF and Flash

* Short term re-print staging and long-term archiving for customer care

* Document Capture, Classification and Data Extraction

* PC based dynamic business document design for batch and client/server

* Document consolidation without changes to your existing applications

* Production formatting on the platform of your choice from MVS to UNIX to any Intel OS

* Campaign management for a multi-channel, electronic and print marketing approach

* Post production, sorting, postal sequencing, discounting, envelope and insertion control

* Network print management for IPDS, Xerox, PCL5, Postscript, and Scitex.