Enterprise Architecture, IT Strategy & Others

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  • BPMS – Pegasystems tool

    Business Process Management (BPM) brings agility, adaptability and flexibility to an organization. It is a discipline within the organization how the business processes are defined and managed. All the profit organization does provide value to the customers by selling a product or service. The steps involved in providing that value requires a sequence of steps and systematic way of documenting those steps and managing it is called the business process management. It applies to financial services, insurances, credit card, retail, bank etc. Documenting the business process and managing it has been followed for almost 20-25 years. Started from the flow chart to state interaction diagram, sequence diagram. Documenting it before the implementation is not a new concept.

    The real problem in the BPM and the IT system implementation are the variance between the documented processes and system implementation. Over the time the variance between the two increases significantly. The higher variance has a compliance and quality issues.

    Systematically keeping it in sync all the time is a new concept.

    In a very very high level, Business Process Management Suite (BPMS) is a set of tools to design the business processes and automatically develop the code for the defined business processes and deploy into the environment.

    There are various products available in this space. IBM Websphere Process server, PegaSystems etc.

    Any one who has worked or working with Pegasystems tools for BPMS implementation, do you think you made the right choice of selecting pegasystems as your BPMS tool. I request you to comment your experience and thoughts related to time to implement, time to delivery, benefits, pricing, ease of implementation, complexity, business team adaption , skill set, required competency and etc.


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  • How HISTORY helps a strategist?

    I was asked more than few times, what is the problem our strategy is trying to solve? My reaction to the question is, if strategy is solving an existing problem, it is not a strategy, it is just a plan. Strategy in general, should not intend to solve an existing problem. Strategy is a long term plan (applicable to a person or an organization or a country and etc) to attain an advantageous position in the future.

    No body preciously predicts the future, but techniques exist to approximate the future. Approximation in this case could be viewed as a mathematical problem or it could be viewed as astrological problem and the perspective is up to the imagination. The most analytical approach is to consider this as a mathematical problem. The bigger problem is to understand and frame the problem in a mathematical form. That is, identification of the mathematical model for the problem. Time series is one of the classical example. In time series, the approximation is done by understanding the patterns in the past and extrapolating it to the future assuming the patterns continues. But we all know the probability of history to repeat all the time is not so great.

    Strategist have been approximating the future by studying the history and by applying their intuition. Some times they were close and sometimes they were way off. These patterns were recursively studied and the approximation improved over the time. To better understand and improve the strategic planning knowledge and intuition, study the history of Romans, Greeks, Mughals, Persians empires and cause of their kingdom expansion and reason for their regime’s failure. History channels have quite a few programs like engineering an empire. It would give an insight to the organization’s competitive strategy formation, analysis and management process. Most of these kingdom failed due to ignoring the obvious, selfish, over confident, under estimated the opponents and etc.

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  • Application Portfolio Assessment – 101

    Finding waste and throwing it away is common phenomenon in the daily life.

    Enterprise Architects play a key role seeking the waste (or redundant) application in the landscape and articulate the senior and executive management to device a plan to sun down to minimize the over all IT running cost. To accomplish that, there are few basic things must be done first. I have seen organization debating significantly in categorizing applications in the landscape. When APA is done without clear overarching plan and basic fundamental defined and understood, there are lots of irrational factors come in to subdue the overall APA process. In my opinion, it is essential to spend some time to define the basics (101). Clear definition on what is an application (or system), component, tool, service, utility and categorize the application in the landscape into those categories.

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