The Eclectic Zone

I had started off my career with some core business application development & support on Visual Basic. Before that I had done some bit on Clipper (remember?) and Visual FoxPro. Then, I had this enriching experience of implementing a Payments Processing system for multiple clients where we weren’t allowed to touch code! It was a completely configuration driven metadata based system, written in Delphi.

Then, for the next 4 years I was deep into the core programming languages (C, C++, and Java when it started) while we were developing a platform for core applications & network monitoring & management, equivalent of an HPOV or IBM Tivoli. We were, that time (around 2003), talking about Autonomic computing and how virtualization (the word in those days!) would sometime be the norm. We were creating a product suite that was ambitious in the sense that the whole application management infrastructure would be self-healing and auto-scaling. Ambitious that time, because the underlying infrastructure was still just coming together. We did create the product and looking back, I can only appreciate that vision.

Autonomic Computing (courtesy IBM)

And then I had a long stint with BPM (which within me still continues to live as a thought process – from tools/products, to discipline of process management, to technological convergence (still in progress), to hard core practices on running BPM projects &  governance thereof). While BPM initiatives still continue to toy back & forth between “the fast, iterative , singles-and-doubles approach” and “ambitious, long-drawn, home-run attempts”, some aspects of BPM styled projects standout nevertheless. Here are some of the critical success factors:

• The decoupling of the technical infrastructure track and the process / application development
• Modeling driven, “visual” and configuration driven process development over shared-serviced-platform as against a vertically integrated application development project
• Ability for IT teams to stick to project governance and platform delivery and facilitating the business to focus on process management and governance.
• Strong support for the Enterprise architecture at strategy and governance level

I had earlier written about how BPM CoEs and various flavors are expected to provide the soft-support over the platform to deliver the BPM promises. BPM platforms, however, provide the ability to go back and forth between the technology driven implementation and the business driven projects. Too much control offered on underlying wiring, and you need seasoned practitioners.

On platforms front, there’s a key progress which is striking to the seeing eyes, but still not noticed widely. Most people understand the infrastructure story on Cloud computing. However, Platforms-as-a-Service (PaaS) is going to be a norm when businesses start exploiting the huge advantage that it offers – the ability to decouple the Platform Engineering, Platform Governance and Platform Implementation.

Applications PaaS (APaaS, as Gartner refers to it as A Step to ‘Killer App’) provides the visual and modeling driven capability for applications development. It is offered as a service, hence decouples the platform engineering from application development as a model. It is also, interestingly, a High-Productivity paradigm that enables a rapid and business oriented application development (as against High Control Paradigm of General Purpose PaaS that ties in app development rigidly to IT).

This is where I see all the dots connecting – Visual Basic or MS Access style of development, Cloud based Platforms-as-a-Service that is modeling driven and autonomic as a platform, Business Value driven BPM style projects that enable focus on Business Value.

So, looks like we have the technological ingredients for the “White collar developers” or “citizen developers” to develop the applications while core IT can focus on the delivery and governance over underlying platforms. While I still see that IT will, for some time to come, control the buying and maintenance of such platforms, the key to their success also lies in the understanding that they need to focus on the role of platform Engineering and Governance, and facilitate the business value driven applications development. Many forward thinking organizations already understand this difference and those are the ones that are (already or on the way to) reaping the benefits of such platforms.

IT can, driven by APaaS, become a Business Platform Provider and facilitate Business Value, and move beyond being Cost Center.

Google has finally arrived into the Enterprise space with their Enterprise BPM offering called Noodle (named after process spaghetti!). They have silently put together their technology and shaped them beautifully into what we have been missing “in one single platform” for a long time. Here’s a sneak-peek at what they have unleashed out of the blue…

Process discovery: With Google’s powerful presence in the email & productivity space, combined with the strong tagging and pattern recognition technology, there’s finally a way to auto discover the spaghetti of processes. It uses the groups and aliases given to all the people and tracks down the frequently used labels and combines with who connected with whom most often, to come up with this. There’s also a way to search and filter the communications to trim off the garbage from this spaghetti.

Collaborative Modeling: Now, here’s a blessing. With a cool collaborative technology using the behind the scene syncing technology around Google docs, and a simple drag & drop and tagging interface, you have a collaborative process modeling environment. There’s obviously no match for “all-attend-in-person” process workshop, but there’s so much that happens after you’re out of that “workshop zone” that brings you back to the real world reality. And ability to remotely collaborate over process model is something that is indeed a blessing.

On the Cloud: Google is on the cloud, your process models will be on the cloud, your processes would execute from the cloud. Unless you have outsourced the process participants’ jobs too, people remain in-house with you.

BPM and ACM, meet each other: A process model designed and deployed through the modeler, process executes through emails, messaging, and the engine that keeps track of a “fixed” and “variable” parts of the process. You obviously cannot do it without detaching the models from the hard definition and single-model-across-instances approach. It works, here, similar to what happens to a Google Doc in a shared mode – while you’re viewing a doc on the cloud it remains the same copy for all. The moment you edit it and make it private for you, it creates a separate process instance so to say – in process world still visible for monitoring and process participation to others. What’s more, you can define which roles can “actually” edit and make the process better. While kicking off a new case/process, one can pick among their favorites. You can like and favorite the process designs you prefer for your group/instance! So, here’s to the process continuum that travels between structured and unstructured without having to pick a separate isolated tool set!

On Mobile: With the Android Apps and (I don’t still know how they did it being two completely disparate organizations even within google) by prebuilding an interface that every Android phone understands natively with Google App Engine, your processes can execute seamlessly from any handset that is powered by Android. It’s also beautiful to know that you can still keep the process going by a single click on the “go ahead” while filling out the detailed forms in parallel. The next participant gets a preview of the task up in their bin while they can wait for the previous form submission from previous participant. Cool!

Social, what social? When you do the collaborative modeling & execution and enable people to participate and subscribe in processes, and you have Android interfaces for capturing the relevant tags and kicking off the process instances, say in customer service; you’re already doing social, aren’t you! Then, you have cool stuff of liking, favoriting and sharing the process templates, Cool!

And there’s a bunch more in sneak-view with google’s marketplace and App Engine based approach that offers the potential to keep expanding the capability without having to fight around whether it is BPM or ACM or Social or mobile or even on cloud or not. Business happens!