The New Year is going to be fast, furious and painful for companies that
blink. Why? The key components are finally lining up to create the infrastructure
for making a top-to-bottom transformation
of our business world.
“The emerging megatrend for businesses
to meet global competition is to become
far more agile and much faster to drive
more value to their customers,” says Bill
Russell, executive vice president of
Allegient. “To accomplish this, companies
will have to tie their business goals, as they
relate to serving customers, all the way
through the enterprise.”
Smart Business spoke to Russell about
how to tap the solutions, the processes, the
people and the technologies that are
emerging to support this new era of speed
and agility.
How will business solutions impact the
emerging megatrend?
We’re going to see a wave of new solutions this year. They’ll be customer-centric
and aimed at generating new revenue or
solving a problem or need. It’s not going to
be about saving money or cutting costs.
You can’t shrink your way to prosperity. It’s
going to be around innovation — with a
huge emphasis on fast delivery and driving
more value to customers. A second mega-area of solutions is going to orient around
business process efficiency. That efficiency
is going to come from a business being able
to tell itself how its processes are operating
(i.e. process intelligence) and changing
them for optimization.
Finally, a whole host of solutions are
going to focus around making knowledge
workers more effective or productive in
collaborating on solutions, including how
to be more creative and how to provide
faster answers to business opportunities.
How are processes changing to support this?
Certainly, faster collaborative solutions
development is going to occur. We’re going
to see new techniques, with more new
agile methods and new smaller-scale proof
of concepts and prototypes, and types of
initiatives that will drive business value faster into the end-user set. Frankly, to
manage all of that, we’re going to see big
trends around portfolio management, different types of initiatives and how to manage those initiatives, in terms of ensuring
that you are executing the highest priority,
the greatest speed and the most value.
Will we have to change the way we work?
In this area, the major trend picking up
speed is tightening the collaboration
between the business and IT sides through
new roles to support the more agile
processes. You can almost predict the
beginning of the disappearance of the separation between business and IT. People
have always talked about the business and
IT areas within their organization, but really, there is no reason for that. We should be
talking about business needs and business
solutions that happen to have a set of roles
— some from the business side and some
from the technical side. Some of the
emerging roles will include process engineers, account managers, business integrators, information architects and composite
solution architects.
What is being demanded from technology?
Remember, we’re talking about a complete transformation of how we’ve been doing business. First, we’re clearly going to
see the examination of ‘software as a service’ or SaaS. The reason for that is because
of the lower risk and the speed of deployment in order to get the business value.
Business process modeling and management technologies will take a big push forward this year. We’re watching the beginning of a movement toward social software, similar to MySpace, Facebook and
Second Life, but for business. The buzzword emerging around this is ‘folk-sonomies,’ which are built on much more
virtual, community-based technology platforms to support this more agile, faster and
collaborative environment we’re discussing. Portals and collaboration software also are sure to see much greater
deployment and emphasis this year.
Finally, the services-oriented architecture/composite application technologies
will be taking a lot more traction in 2008
because they support mash-ups, which are
going to be hot.
What are mash-ups?
Mash-ups bring different information
from different sources together and create
something new for the value of a customer,
executive or knowledge worker. For example, when you Google an address and get a
map, you also get other data coming from
street addresses and related information. It
all gets mashed up before you see it to give
you a richer consumer experience. In a
business context, I might take data from a
manufacturing system about what product
has been produced, marry it to the customer data from my customer relationship
system, and then I might want to look at
my warranty database to see if there were
any problems with the product. All of that
is mashed up before I see it and before I go
in to visit my customer. It’s going to include
a portal presentation layer that allows me
to request that mash-up in a really snazzy
user interface.
BILL RUSSELL is executive vice president of Allegient in
Indianapolis. Reach him at [email protected] or (317) 564-5701.
