ERP, SCM, Enterprise Architecture and more

:-) yesterday I drove north from Copenhagen and saw (what I think was) the Google Street View car … shall be fun to see if they captured me

Comment on; Is there a Future for a Commerce Cloud? from Retail Rumblings

I think that “the cloud” is here, and will stay … or has been here for a while, just think about all the mainframe applications that is hosted and run in a distant location somewhere … isn’t that the cloud? What have happened lateley (the last years) is that a standard of accessing and govern services run from a distance, and by other organisations is eveolving.

We can call this cloud computing, we can call this service oriented architecture or we can call it enhanced mainframe computing :-) but to be really honest it is all about experience, and ability to use standards to lower the risk, and deliver business driven applications.

I think that the days when IT departements was in charge of the enterprise solutions is coming to an end. We are now in the days when, finally, the business will drive the functionality. As an example look at the 2009 version of Microsoft Dynamics AX, where there is an easy to use workflow engine (based on standard) it is integrated with the SharePoint software so that it is easy to publish and handle the information from remote sites.

The challange to come is the quality of the services, and how to govern this; SOA Governance if we dont have a good way of handling the quality and the responsibilities, and everything around that the cloud computing will not be as successful as it could be. It is in a way two different kind of transactions that needs to be taken into consideration; business critical, and non business critical.

But back to the fact that business and IT need to collaborate; I think that an obvious example of this can also be seen inside Microsoft Dynamics AX 2009 where alerts, and different levels can be altered by non IT people. This might be true for SAP, Oracle, and many other business applications, and if you have good examples, please tell me.

so in summary; Yes there is a Future for a Commerce Cloud. The correct business transactions and IT infrastructure will be moved into the cloud first, but when the cloud computing reaches higher maturity we will se more and more business critical solutions moving in there also.

Everyone knows that we have a bad economic environment at the moment. This affects the behaviour of people, and companies. People spend less, and the companies invest less … I’m not into economics so I shall not even try to explain to myself what effect this will have, and I will not even dream of explaining it to any potential readers out there …

But I will accept the fact that this has an effect on the companies; less money in results in a spiral going down. We definitly see evidence that not all companies are showing bad figures, some are even doing better at the moment than the same period last year :-) One example could be RnB from Sweden that both in March and during the period December 2008 to end of February 2009 is doing better than the same period the year before. There can be a number of factors behind this, and I do not know the details in why RnB is successful.

Generally in the business environment of today there are some things that should be tested

• New sales channels; web, subscriptions, …
• Better customer control; CRM, BI
• Improve customer loyalty;
• Point of Sale system; Improved customer experience, better service
• Trade Promotion Management

In these days it can be hard to get the budget to implement new IT systems to support these initiatives but there are ways.

Look at outsourcing of some of your applications as a tool to cut the operational cost. If you manage to lower your cost through the standard outsourcing activities you will get money to invest in the future of the business.

Implementing one or a number of the above suggested areas will increase the sales in different ways.

The POS (Point of Sale) system will ensure that you can collect more information about how, what, and when your customers are shopping. With a customer loyalty program you can connect the POS information with your CRM and BI systems and optimize the offerings to each customer.

But what IT system should I chose you may think… I will not make a firm recomendation to you without having the background and context of your business, but some recomendations (not silverbullets, and not very unique)

• What fits in my business strategy
  • Merger and Aqusitions
  • Organic growth
  • Global precense / New markets
• What fits in my IT strategy
  • Microsoft, SAP, Oracle, Best of Breed, Best of Need
• What IT system have the needed functionality
  • 150% functionality or 90% plus amendments
• What is the total cost of ownership of the system
  • Some of the systems out there might not fit the size of your organization, ot the skills that you have in your company might be a bit wrong

My last year have been filled of products, and some of them had a obvious fit in the system map in almost any company. Advanced planning systems has developed a lot in the last years, the product that Kineticsware have (KAPS) is a new generation advanced planning system, that handles the input information in a new way, and uses new algorithms to speed up the calculations, it has a great interface to present the information to the end user. It also gives the posibility to to "What if" scenarios because it have the new way of doing the calculations that gives the speed.

Another very interesting functional area that I personally had not spent a lot of thoughs of is the Trade Promotion Management. After reading research from companies like AMR, AT Kerney, SAP, Kineticsware, and Infosys it is obvious that this area have need for end to end solutions. There are some products out on the market that claims to have the holistic view of the challange. I am sure that many of the big consultant firms, like EDS, can provide expertise in the area but with the area being quite new to the product companies (Microsoft, SAP, Oracle ...) the interesting thing here is that new products have the possibility to position themself in the market, and make a big difference. So ... what is Trade Promotion Management? TPM is the business process of managing incentives between manufacturer and retailer to improve the sales of a product. That can at first sound quite easy, right? But when you start to dig into the problem space you soon find that it is more complex to get right than you imagined in the beginning. And that insight is usually the first sign of that some automated support might be good to have. Do everyone need a new product? No of course not, but the market now offers products for companies in every size from the small to the large enterprises. When scanning the market for good solutions I think it is important to find a solution that gives the functionality that you need, and can grow with your business. It might be the correct thing to go for SAP if you have the strategy of using SAP solutions, but a Microsoft solution will be a extremly good alternative for many companies. There are of course other vendors that should be evaluated, but do not forget to take things like stability, scalability and other non-functional aspects into consideration as well as the functionality.

The ROI of implementing automated support of the TPM activities is very often very good, but do not forget to apply som organisational changes when you are doing it also so that you actually use the new features. And the change of business processes is not only in the sales and marketing department ... it will affect more parts of your business. I think that a TPM solution can be the innovation that often is talked about in BPR that is needed to lift the company performance to a new level. If/when you get that advantage of the solution it is also possible to repeat the activity and continue to be successful.

When should we upgrade our Enterprise software? It can be the ERP system, the CRM system, the business ware house or some other enterprise software that was quite an investment to upgrade. The first thing I really hope that a modern implementation gave was a modularisation of the add-ons and changes that was done to the standard system to fit the company needs. The really first question to ask when the upgrade or not to upgrade question comes to the agenda is probably, why? Why should I spend time and money on the upgrade right now? Is it to get the functionality that I have done manually? Is it because some functionality have been introduced that I have made as amendments, and by upgrading I can get down the maintenence cost? Is it because the software vendor will not give support on the product any more? Another thing that have to be included in all upgrades is; the business case! ... what is the time for ROI (return of investment) ?

I think that an upgrade is a perfect point in time to ask some other questions also ... - Do I really need all the functionality that I have? Are we the best to perform this service? By asking questions like this it is easy to identify if the business strategy and the it-implementation is aligned. Often it do not take very long time before the business and the IT strategies slowly glides away from each other, even though everyone knows that the IT is "only" there to support the business.

When should I then upgrade my system? One thing for is true; It will never be a perfect time to upgrade a business essential system! You will get arguments like; "It will steal time from my normal work" , "We do not have time to do that at the moment, we just have to do this first" ... and excuses like that. But ... have you thought about the cost of additional resources that the business have to use to cover the lack of functionality or the stability that you will get with the new version? IT is there to support the business and occationaly also be the inovation that gives the business advantage. But if the gap between business and IT becomes to big then the cost of daily bridging that will also grow. You could argue that it is somewhat exponential because you will have to have overlapping manual functionality together with the system functionality. The conclusion of that is that keeping the IT up to date is not a cost it is an enabler for IT inovation and reducing the cost of the resource bridge.

A big operational expense for a lot of enterprises today is the amendments that are done to the ERP system that is installed. You have the standard changes to reports, and information views. You have the as common additions of fields to the database and to the forms. The Forms, just think about how hard it can be in "legacy" ERP systems to add or change a field ... from 10 characters to 15 characters. The time needed to change the system is in direct relation to the cost of changing the system.

With the Dynamics AX platform we have a reliable platform for developing scalable, secure, and functional rich products. The last years we have read and heard a lot about Ruby on Rails, RoR is/was perhaps the biggest change to web development this decade. I think that Microsoft Dynamics AX provides at least the same advantage over other ERP systems with its X++, Morph X and the integration to the rest of the Microsoft stack. You might have looked at the MVC (Model-View-Controller) patterns that RoR supports, and if you like that you should look at the code that is in the Microsoft Dynamics AX application, it is a joy to read the code, and it supports the most design patterns that you can find in any book.

Yes there are things that a framework like RoR will do better than AX, and the other way around, but that is not the point here, the point is to understand the advantage that products developed on a robust framework like the Microsoft Dynamics AX framework delivers compared to no framework at all or to a legacy framework that do not provide all the built in features that you get with the Microsoft Dynamics AX framework.

With a product developed for the Microsoft Dynamics AX ERP system you will for "free" get scalability, security, governance, and reliability and lower maintenance cost. That means that most of the non functional attributes of the product is already taken care of. The product vendor will have to make sure that the product is tested and made sure that the basic code is correct ;-)

ISVs like Kineticsware are building enhancements to the AX product that result in extreme ROI calculations for the customers that implements them. Will the customers need changes to the base product? Yes almost every customer wants to have some amendments made to the base product, and here is one of the big wins when going for MS Dynamics AX ... they will get faster and cheaper changes! Both short term and long term.

What about future mergers or expansions or integrations? ... will that be an issue to take the requirements of this into the existing system? Will it be expensive to change all the screens where the employees are working? as an CIO/CEO/CFO, take things like this into consideration ...

I just tried Internet Explorer 8 from Microsoft, and yes it is still Internet Explorer, and yes it has some new features, but is it something that will change my life? No, probably not, but I really like the activities functionality that for sure will make my life a bit easier, and not fill my explorer with tabs.

Some new functionality have been introduced;

• Activities menu
• Web slices

The activities menu you can see an example of here to the right, its a nice functionality but not revolutionary, and the web slices seems to be nice functionality but the webpages need some adaptaions to support it. And yes ... it is Microsoft so there will be pages out there that support the functionality.

In my example I marked the text "Kineticsware" and tried to look it up on the maps, but it didnt get it right ... (There are ofcourse explanations to this, but somewhat fun at least)

The wrapup of this new version is that, sure it is fun with a new version, but at first look this version does not give me personally very much, I have not used it long enough to be able to determine if it is faster and the reliability wouldnt be fair to jsutify at the moment when it is a beta version.

Data on 15m benefits claims 'lost by Customs' - Telegraph

Wow ... I think this will change the view on security, or at least I hope so ... Im sure that the solution to prevent things like this is not the most expensive to implement. The solution would definitly not just be an IT solution, but it should also be a business process change.

I guess that the security consultants just became more expensive :-) it also shows that even if you have full control in some places if you dont have the full picture it is hard to find the week links in the chain.

One can wonder what the value of this information is on the market ... ... a very quick search with Google finds information from among others, NY Times, that stolen credit card information is "worth" between $50 USD and $100 USD. Perhaps this is then 15 000 000 times $100 USD ...

Even if we cant set a price on information, I think that this shows how important it is to protect the information that holds the business value. Security is and should always be part of architecture, spanning from Enterpise Architecture to Infrastructure Architecture.

Some unstructured thoughts of what has happened in the IT business/technology lately ...

iPhone hits the market in germany and great britain. The iPhone from Apple was released in Europe, and in the same manner as teen agers queue to rock concerts, the religious Apple people queue to get the final solution to global starvation, global environment improvement, and a world without any kind of conflicts ;-) Serious ... Yes the iPhone is really great, I got to play with it for 5 minutes last week, and I must say; I am impressed! Apple shows that they understand what the intended market segment wants! But it would not be usefull for many business people at the moment, and I think they have forgot that the European cellular system differs from the US ... in Europe we use 3G network for high speed data ... I read on the internet some rumors about when Apple shall release a iPhone with 3G, but I could not find anything official ... that is a bit worrying! and as soon the applications/add ons starts to hit the web, the Apple iPhone will be very intersting ... but Im sure that the intended segment will buy it now anyway :-)
As always these days, the telecom operators are limiting the availability of the phones by locking them for use in only their network! ... In UK I think that it is O2 that got the pleasure of indroducing the iPhone ... This can be explained to a non technical person as; If a bridge was build, only certain car brands would be allowed to drive on them ... Think about the Golden Gate Bridge ... if you was forced to use a certain car brand when driving on it ... would that be acceptable?

Speaking of phones, Google announced that they will release a phone ... It will be based on a Linux kernel, and that must mean that it will be more or less open source. Is that bad or good? It is hard to say at the moment, it will probably mean that it will be "easy" to make custom application, and remem bering that it is Google that is behind the phone, I am sure that "user friendly" will be part of the description of the phone.

That is probably the secret behind both the presumed success of iPhone, and why many think that it is so interesting that Google will release a phone ... "user friendly"

Google is doing other more classic Google things also ... they are looking into have ads in games. This is something that Microsoft already have this possibility in its xbox live environment. (Microsoft baought a company a while back that was specialised in this area) Im not sure if Microsoft is using the ads in the xbox live environmanet, but it will be quite intersting to see how and what kind of ads Google will push into the gaming arena.

IBM is acquiring Cognos ... probably responding to last month news when SAP acquired Business Objects. IBM is to pay $5 Billion according to the article I read. It seems to be some serious consolidation trends in the market at the moment, we have four large ISVs left; Microsoft, IBM, SAP, Oracle, and maybe CA

Ok, so what BI players do we still have on the market? at least we still have Microsoft, and their news release of performancepoint server 2007 wich is/will be a very good competitor to the other BI vendors. Microsoft is continuing their integration with sharepoint server and that will of course help you with the delivery and access to the information. They have also focused on self service, meaning that users that have the access rights will be allowed to create own reports and analysis. I found an interesting report on the web that I think you should read if you are interesting in what happens in the BI area. [link]

BI is of course interesting but as usually it will be just as good as the input information and the ability to use it is; Quality = Input information * Usability * Functionality. The functionality is mature enough today I would dare to say, yes each vendor will have thier top functionality to show, and claim that this is the key to success, but if we ask us if that is the main issue we will find when implementing true BI in the organisation ... it will probably not be the answer.
So the focus should be data quality, and usability ... Data quality is probably easiest to get from your ERP system, and not from all the sources. Since the ERP system usually is a well defined consolidation point most of the information needed will be in the system already. Looking at for example Microsoft Dynamics AX that holds a lot of the transactions that occur in a normal business you would have a perfect place to hunt for data. Combine it with some external sources that is connected through a userfriendly interface that allows the managers that are working, organisationally, further away from the central information to create their own reports and analysis

For you out there that loves hardware, I am sure that you have read Toms Hardware pages for many years, and now when the Christmas is coming Tom have started a wonderful serie of articles! Holiday Buyer's Guid 2007. I have no clue what he is recomending, but he really can make a motherboard look appealing ;-)

What requirement does the SaaS (Software + Service) put on your systems scalability? In theory it will require you to have IT systems that can scale more or less unlimited. This is if the context is that you are providing a SaaS system for others to use. If you are a provider of services to use or you are a company that are using services from someone else, you are still depending on the fact that it can scale. You could argue that when you are consuming the service (using) you can solve the issue by having a service level agreement (SLA), and yes some kind of contract is always needed when two parties are providing services to each other. But a SLA will not be very useful when your company shall merge with the newly bought company and you suddenly need twice the number of users that run the SaaS application, and the service provider just can not scale. It might be a question of time, the service provider needs to buy more hardware, and is "just" waiting to get it delivered, but depending on the service plattform in the back it might be that it just is not possible to scale.  SaaS is about using a service from some source, and the source can be modern and it can be of more or less legacy type. When it is a modern type of back end systems, and content sources there is a good chance of it being scalable, but what about when the backend system is old, and maybe not that scalable? will the Service provider have the possibility to scale as you as consumer want? It can also be the case that your SaaS provider is using some other SaaS provider and relays the result ... then your provider is not in control of the scalability!

How can you then be sure that your provider can scale, or even ... how can you be sure that you can scale when the demand of your services becomes huge!?

It is very much a question about communication and also to have total control of your environment. To communicate with the CxOs that takes the final decision if you shall buy/sell the service it is important to be able to show them what they are interested in knowing, and formatted in a way that they get the level of details that they want to have. It is equal important then to have control on much more detailed or fine granular level. Example of techniques is UML for system architecture, and powerpoint to describe the high level. The glue that makes this possible is to use an Enterprise Architecture framework that can contain both high level views and fine granular views. Examples of frameworks to use is Togaf, Zachman, or Capgeminis IAF

We have all seen the Gartner technology hypecurve, and also used it for doing market planning . I found a version on the net that I have inserted here ... I thought that I should try to use the power of internet and web 2.0 ... and also to see if there is someone that reads my blog :-)

My hope is that you out there adds a comment to my blog and adds one or more "technologies" that you think belongs somewhere on the curve. Below I created a template. What I want is a comment with a maturity between 1 and 15. To be able to follow this up and get some legimity to the figures I think that it is important that when you post your coordinates it is also important to write a couple of sentences that explains why you think that the technology belongs at the coordinate! Together with the number a letter (S, M, or F) to indicate if the technology is moving with Slow (S), Medium (M) or with Fast speed over the hype curve.

I want the hype curve to show where we are on new years evening 2008/2009!

It would be very nice to get the contributors name, title, and organisation/company also ... That is not to discreminate anyone, but to help other persons that wants to use this "blog" created information.

Depending on the traffic and volume of information, I will update the hypecurve, and summarise the discussions ... and try to do some analysis of the information once a week.

It could also be the fact that some of your opinions is regional, and that you are aware of that. If so please then also write that and the reason. It will probably help the discussions.

My first contributions (could change after some discussions) are;

• 11S - SOA - I think that SOA is mature, but not mature enough that everyone understands it
  It will become more mature when the abreviation is demystified ... We need to understand that SOA is not all about technology, it is also very much about SOE or Service Oriented Enterprise. And the real boost that will kick off SOA is when we get a more mature Enterprise Architects community in the IT industry
• 7F - SaaS - Because it is becoming more common in the market place I think that this is a fast mover from the top of the curve into the slope, but it will get up of the valley quite fast and into the area of maturity
• 13S - BPO - The companies with the business strategy dares to take the step, and they are becoming quite common. The technology behind the offering has become mature, and so have also the delivery model
• 4F - Agile BPO - Agile BPO is a new approach that will be very attractive to a lot of customers, that is why I think it is very fast moving and I also think that by 2008/2009 it will have reached the top of the hype, and fast slide down and into the maturity area
• 8S - Demand Driven Supply Chains - This is one of the challanges in the supply chain to go from push to pull, it will incorporate collaboration in all the steps of the supply chain to get it to work. And when noramally complex supply chain it will involve advanced planning solutions to be effective. It will also put new demands on supplier relationship management.
• 12F - APS - The first generation advanced planning systems has been around for a while, and is working very well, but will soon be replaced by newer technology. But there is still a lot of companies that will make their first generation installation with these systems.
• 4F - APS 2.0 - The second generation of Advanced Planning Systems will be recognizde during this comming year, and the companies that realise the benefit of parallell planning of both resources and capacity at a speed that allows for making "what if" scenarios will get to ROI very fast.

Do not forget that there could be other fun/interesting/valuble technologies that belong in the curve, please help out to find them!

I got this thought from a friend! and I really like it! Lets see if I can explain it ...

How much planning do we need to do when starting a new project? Is the need for planning a result of how good we are to handle change? Do we really need to take everything into consideration upfront or can we adapt while we work?
Change management to requirements are today a natural part of software development methods like RUP (Rational Unified Process) and of more lightweight methods from the agile community. This is the foundation of iterations ... we dont have all the facts, so lets do what we can do at the moment and figure out the rest later on ...
I think everyone in the IT business agrees that this is a good way of working, but what does this mean when you are talking about architecture for your IT solution or enterprise?

Assume that difference over time is the same as difference in space (two different dimensions). If you walk outside the requirements on your shoes slowly change, maybe from walking on grass to walking on sand. This change in requirements could also be achived by just standing still and wait for the grass to grow ... another example is to sit in a room, and then change room to the room next door, just to find out that there is two degrees colder in the new room. Or you can just sit in the room and wait for it to get colder ... time and space (location) both changes the requirements...

We have agreed that it is possible to handle the requirements when they change over time ... it should then also be possible to handle requirement that change in space. But can we handle any kind of change in requirements? No that is much harder, the same in our examples ... A small change in temperature in a room will lead to putting a blanket over the shoulders. A large change in temperature would require a totaly different approach ... The same when we create an architecture! Small chages can be handeled, but major chages calls for bigger changes in the architecture.

This is what often is called an agaile approach ... and as always nothing is perfect, you will need to set it into a context, and the better you can make a guess about the future (time or space) the easier your architecture will be to do.

What is truly needed when doing an architecture, is a framework that gives you best practices, preferably some architectural patterns to reuse and a way to structure the deliverables and make sure that no needed parts of the architecture is missing. If you have that, and some experience that makes it possible to accelerate the architecture, and avoid having to make to big changes. Another nice thing is some reference architectures like SCOR or eTOM that is specific for you line of business, and will accelerate and assure that the differences in time and space is small.

p.s. for you out there that knows me, and my friends, can you guess who came up with this idea about the two dimensions that affect requirements in the same or results in the same thing?

Some unstructured thoughts of what has happened in the IT business/technology lately ...

SAP just left their normal way of growing, and aquired the french company Business Objects, it will be really interesting to see what will happen in the future! I think this opens up for Cognos to be the alone "independant" BI software vendor. It will also be interesting to see how the two cultures will work together, German and French business culture is not always alike. SAP also promotes their new version ... new codebase? ok ... a question to ask yourself, ... is that then a new system or is it the same? What about the risks? I hope for everyones sake that it is a tested new system, and that there exists a state of the art transition tool ... and Im sure that there do exist a tool like that but what is the quality, and how many consultant hours will be needed to support it? We can also notice that SAP had a good Q3, and still makes a lot of money, so they are doing something right :-)
Another giant that is working hard with business integration must be Oracle, I have lost track of how many companies they have bought, but I know its a lot ... and even being extremly optimistic, that must take very long time to integrate into both the company and into the software.  I read somewhere that Oracle and HP are offering joint solutions ... and that this is targeting the mid sized market, because it simplifes the offering!? Is that really the problem in the mid sized market?

Microsoft Dynamics AX will be shown in Copenhagen next week at the Microsoft EMEA Convergence, as well as the other products in the Microsoft Dynamics suite. It will be very fun to see glimps of the future from Microsoft ... My company Kineticsware will be there and I will be there, hope to see someone that reads my blog. With AX comes the jungle of different solutions ... yes it is a jungle to find a solution, hence I think that the market is open for solution providers that wants and have the ability to put together complete solutions to meet a need in the market. One of theese small but very useful solutions that just hit the market is "Kineticsware Inbound Logistics Management Solution". Microsoft keeps adding new applications to the stack, and becomes even better in the enterprise solution range, they very recently added Office Communications Server (OCS) 2007, a platform for delivering unified communications to users of its Office productivity suite that will be a productivity enhancer for many companies that need to improve their ability to work in different sites. Microsofts CEO Steve Ballmer said something about acqusitions ... and it might been that statement that kicked of the rumors about Facebook ... will Microsoft buy Facebook, or will Google buy Facebook? ... it is possible to make bets on whom will buy Facebook ... I read in the paper that you can even place a bet that IKEA, the Swedish furniture company would buy Facebook, but that sounds like a very high odds to me :-) Microsoft also launched Halo 3 ... I have not even played Halo 1 ...

The Supply Chain Managment business has some very interesting players like Manhattan Associates that is one of the leading WMS (Werehouse Management Systems) vendors in the market today. My company, Kineticsware, as well as other companies are using the ILS .Net solution to integrate with MS Dynamics AX and then lifting the AX solution to a first class and extremly competitive solution. Manhattan Associates continues to enhance their products with new functionality at the same time as they are expanding rapidly in Europe, and specificly in Russia!

Gizmodo, the gadget site shows the smallest radio so far ... and wisley point sout that it still need a AAA battery ... I think that shows that someone should explain that we need more battery time in our devices, some of us are actually outside of the lab, and occasionally meets some people ;-)

I will try to write more about some stuff that I have in mind after Convergence in Copenhagen

(more to follow ...)

What is Agile BPO? who want Agile BPO? Who delivers agile BPO?

I think that Agile BPO is the BPO that targets medium sized companies, it is a cost effective way to outsource sertain business processes even if the outsourced part of the business is not huge or even large. It is also useful for larger companies and also smaller companies ... when you need/want to be more cost effective in some business areas. It is the art to be able to handle more than one task per resource in the BPO center or the art to be able to switch extremly fast between companies in the BPO center. We have already seen this in the call center business, where even small companies can use switchboard functionality with excelent quality and price.
As we can see in the picture to the right, medium sized companies spend proportionally much more on typically BPO processes. This shows that there are very good oportunities for the companies in this segment as well as for the enterprises that still have not used BPO to create value in their business.

So what business processes could be possible to use an "Agile BPO" approach on?

Example; Customer Care / Call center (Switch board, Fist line of accounting departement), Logistics, Accounting (Invoice handling), Procurement, Human Resource (HR) and more ... As you see this is the same list as normal BPO ... What is then different with Agile BPO?
Agile BPO will cover the needs of cutting cost in smaller business! Up till now you have in the western countries been able to use

Who can deliver BPO today? We have all the regular palyers like; InfoSys, TCS , Wipro, Satyam, HCL, Cognizant, IBM India, Accenture India, Capgemini India and all of these players are natural choise of the bigger companies, but there are new players coming in to the market!

(more to follow ...)

Origin; CTO Blog | Enterprise Architects versus Business Architects (Capgemini CTO blog)

The normal talk about aligning Business with IT, and can the Enterprise Architects do the business architecture? I think that most of us agree that one big challange of today is to align the business with the IT. We can then of course also add SaaS or BPO to the discussion, and go down to details like business processes and business services, but is that the starting point? I am convinced that we have to start one step before that in most of the cases and ask if we really have a willingness to align the business strategy with the IT strategy, and how do we think that this will be done?

Shall we ask the IT guys that has no idea about business issues to do the alignment? Shall we ask the business people to tell the IT how things should be done? Hmm ... hard question? ;-) No, I thin it is not a hard question ... the alignment of the two "classically" parted camps is probably the hardest thing to do, not to descide if it should be done ... Who should do it?

Should the business architects do it? Or should the SOA (IT architects) do it? or do we have a group that is specialised in doing this? To be an Enterprise Architect is also to be able to know when to use an expert ... a business architect or an infrastructure architect ...
As everyone ... even the Enterprise Architect has a legacy, and has developed himself/herself over the years, and become more skilled in some part of the architecture spectrum ... If the horizontal axis is business to infrastructure (covering also information and systems in between) not all Enterprise Architects will be experts in the business architecture, and neither will all be experts in information architecture ... the curve will probably follow some kind of normal distribution as the most in our world. The same kind of distribution will apply when you look at the "depth" of the architects, some will work with concepts, and strategies, and some will work with more physical issues ...

My point is that yes we have new challanges, both in technology (SOA, SaaS) and in business (BPO ...) but the biggest thing we are facing is to accept that IT is a essential enabler in the modern business, and thus it has to enable the business strategy ... Nothing new, but take a look around you and be honest, is this really the case in your company?

The fact is often that we find great IT systems but they can not fullfill the business strategy ... and we also have no clear picture of how to do the alignment, and what kind of alignment we need.

I think that this is the space where the Enterprise architects fit, a role that is expert in connecting the different areas in the enterprise, and fulfilling the strategies to the best possible degree, by using expert architects in the different aspecs ... like Business Architects and Infrastructure Architects or SOA Architects.

SAP, Oracle, Microsoft the three large ERP vendors in the market today ... (sorry if someone else feels that they should be mentioned, but then you have the oportunity to make a comment.) Some days ago SAP bought the french company Business Objects that are specialized in Business Intelligence. By doing that they left the normal organic growth strategy ... This is very interesting from a business strategy point, and I think it will be very interesting to follow SAP and what they will do in the market.

What BI (Business Intelligence) tool providers are still out there?

• Business Objects - aquired by SAP
• Cognos
• Hyperion Solutions - aquired by Oracle
• MicroStrategy
• Microsoft

What is the value of buying a BI tool? Well, I usually say that it is perfect to have a tool, at least when you have so much controll over your information (data) so that you know what to measure, and what information to use when measuring ... Will you know that when you buy a tool? Probably not! How will you know that? The easiest and probably the only way is to structure your business/enterprise. The most effective way to get to result is to use an Enterprise Architecture method, and focus on finding the correct performance indicators (KPI). Without control and connected business and IT it will be very hard to know what to put into the tools ... and yes the ERP vendors have some insight of what is usually used, but I think it needs business expertise to really nail the correct information.

What about Microsoft Dynamics AX and BI? Yes, MS Dynamics AX has for a long time been prepared for using techniques like OLAP cubes for analysing the information, and furthermore with the usage of the latest Microsoft SQL server the integration to the Microsoft office suite has become excelent, reducing the cost of learning and maintainig new applications. Some might say that you have to do more yourself with the Microsoft tool set, but my strong belief is that the fun (hard) work is to structure your company and find out what you want to measure ...
It is still also very important to remember that even though you have a ERP system installed and running it will probably not contain everything that you want to measure, there will be other sources in your business that are important ... and here the use of some ETL tool becomes very important. I usually talk of best of breed in companies, but that is an approach to use when it can really give a business advantage.

The business intelligence market is supposed to be worth $8 billion a year, and grow at 11% a year between now and 2010 according to Forrester Research (see link)

It is very valuble to have control of what happens and can happen in your company, and that information will help you to make the right descisions, but without modern IT support that enables the users to work effectivly you will bot get the correct information into the systems, and with the wrong information you will get wrong answers ;-)

You are running your ERP system ... yes it has been around for some years, and you have built in unique functionality that is essential for your company, or you have ideas about what should be built.
Do you operate a legacy ERP system? and does your ERP vendor tell you that now you should upgrade to the new version of the system?

This is a very common scenario, and very often does the company forget to ask themself a very important question; Why should you upgrade? Should we look at new solutions?

There are some questions that everyone should ask themself;

• Is the cost of upgrading the ERP system as high as implement a new?
• What is the cost of implementing a modern ERP system?
• Is the new version that my current vendor suggests really a new ERP system?
     (based on new technology? rewritten?)
• What benefits can I get when chosing a new system?
• Is my business the same as it was when I chose my current, legacy, ERP system?
• How is the new modern ERP systems organised to make my own additions easy to upgrade? will I have to make changes in each screen?
• What is the cost of training the employees in the new version? compare to training cost of a new modern system that looks and works as normal MS Windows applications
• What is the TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) of the new version compared to a best in class ERP system

My knowledge is best in Microsoft Dynamics AX, and I have some insight in SAP, Oracle and Movex (Lawson M3). In AX the coding is blasting fast, the upgrading is made extreamly easy by the layer approach;  As you can see in the picture Dynamics AX has the code in different layers, where the custom code created for your company is in the outmost layers and that makes upgrading as efficient as possible. The tools makes it possible to fast and efficient determine if some code need to be changed after the upgrade or if it is still working as intended.

Another neet thing is the modern and well structured codebase that for example makes it possible to add a field in one place, and then that field shows on all other screens ... I have not heard of this anywhere else ... have we not all seen ERP consultants sitting and doing time consuming changes to all screens where a field should be? ... What is the cost of next upgrade ... should that be taken into consideration? Yes!!!  it is the responsibility of each CIO to inform the management team of both initial and future costs!

Does Microsoft Dynamics AX compete with SAP, Oracle and other mid-sized to large scale ERP systems? Yes! with version 4.0 of MS Dynamics AX, it became scalable! together with the unique functionality created with maximum effectivness it is an alternative to seriously consider!

(more to follow ...)

Software as a service (SaaS) has become one of the latest hyped word that is on everyones lips theese days! SaaS is a thought/concept that really is affecting almost everyone today, it can be in their everyday work or it can be indirect because the business is done a bit different!

Is SaaS a new thing or have we seen it before? It is a new and revolutionary thing in the way that we have got a new context for delivery, the internet. This means that it is easier to provide services for a larger set of customers. Have we had SaaS before? yes, we have had services/software that is ready to use. It has even been outsourced and run by other organisations. (ASP - Application Service Providers) It has not been as visible and easy to use/start to use.

We can always discuss levels of service delivery or usage, and we have often seen bespoke systems that was run internally and we have seen application service providers that has been selling IT services in a very similar way. Yes there are differences, but I am sure that you can always find differences if you look for it. So we have had the service delivery before why does everyone talk about SaaS?

I think it (as usually) gets down to the business needs. We need to get a better TCO (total cost of ownership) or lower operational expenses, but we also need to lower the implementation cost of a system. Everyone has heard of monolitic ERP implementations that had a cost of implementation that is astronomical. (huge capital expense) It is very important for the software vendors of today to offer both low capital expense and low operational expense to their customers ... how do we do that? I think that the path to success is to create solutions that fits the need of a segment, and focus on fast implementation of a system that is manageble over time ... (that was kicking in open doors) But ... this is the art of creating both good software and a library of best practices that can be used to accelerate the implementation. Compare the normal implementation time of SAP versus Microsoft Dynamics AX for example; MS Dynamics AX will be faster to implement, it will be more cost effective to operate and it will be easier to amend/adapt to the needs of the company. And yes, it is possible to find solutions for MS Dynamics AX that delivers the functionality needed. (and we have not even discussed usability ...)

What about paying for the usage? When it comes to turning the tap and increase the flow of IT, that is one of the interesting things about SaaS ... but that also shows that we still think about IT solutions and not Business solutions ... Should we not take BPO (business process outsourcing) into consideration when we think of SaaS or even before? We can see BPO as the business version of SaaS, this comes back to the thinking of aligning business strategy and IT strategy! If we are considering SaaS we should absolutley consider BPO!

Do we need SaaS? (or at least the concept of services at demand) ... yes, it is here to change the concepts of the IT business, but you need to take more things into consideration before happily run out and start to use SaaS

Some unstructured thoughts about Enterprise Architecture;
Enterprise architecture has become a hyped expression. And that is of course something that is good, but how many so called Enterprise Architects have the experience and knowledge to create an enterprise architecture?

How many of the enterprise architects are really taking the different aspects into consideration?

It is a must to set the work into the correct context, starting with the current architecture and the business and IT strategty. As important it is to use a framework of best practices to ensure that all needed aspects like security, governance, integration, ability to change, and the time aspect.

When we are talking and thinking about enterprise architecture we automatically comes in to buisiness issues, and business strategies. This is a must to take into consideration when doing the architecture as does the IT strategy of the company.

What about aligning the Business strategy with the IT strategy? In the modern company this is very important because the IT systems is the engine that drives the company. But the role of the IT Strategy and the Business strategy is to guide the implementation of business and IT in the company and the closer you get theese building blocks together the better, and that is one of the prime resons we have architecture!

When we start digging in these areas we will find thing that do not fit together, and then we need to make priorisations between them to know what is most important to the company.

Given this "small" things you will have a very good start when the rest of the architecture creation starts ...