Café Innovation Blog

Café Innovation — SOA Success and the IT-Business Relationship [Posted on Oct. 14, 2007 04:48 PM ]

It’s now about 10 days after TechEd ’07 in Las Vegas, and as always SAP practitioners are wowed by all the things that are going to impact their lives going forward! There is a lot of discussion on the cool new ways of doing things and the confirmation of SAP’s SOA direction. In all of this excitement, let us toss in a few additional considerations – factors that will be important determinants of SOA success or otherwise.  

I’d like to point out that the advent of SOA has not  in any way diminished the importance of the People-Process-Technology equation that has characterized so many discussions of technology solutions. So to begin, let us talk about how people and their interactions influence the success (or, failure) of SOA efforts.

It is my contention that IT and business in any organization need to come together in a meaningful way,  else an organization’s SOA ambitions are not going to be realized. Why is this important? In a services-oriented world it is all about processes and these are owned by the business. IT alone cannot create the perfect service oriented enterprise.  Some of you may be able to relate to the following scenarios…

• Is there a possible disconnect between IT and the business in your organization? 
• If you are from the business side of the house, have you felt that IT’s arrogance (at least as perceived from your point of view) has prevented you from getting a really solid business process implemented?
• If you are from the IT side of the house, have you felt (from your point of view) that the business users make unrealistic demands?

If you have experienced any of these emotions/thoughts/dynamics, you are not alone. These are some of the symptoms that point to a dysfunctional relationship between IT and the business in many organizations.

For a more expansive read of the topic I refer you to an article in the Fall 2007 issue of the NetWeaver magazine (http://www.netweavermagazine.com/archive/Volume_03_(2007)/Issue_04_(Fall)/v3i4a04.cfm?session) titled IT and Business: A Positive Relationship Equals SOA Success that speaks to this dysfunctional relationship and points out that we need to accomplish a more harmonious balance between IT and the business for SOA efforts to succeed in an organization.

What has your experience been? What, in your opinion, are some concrete actions organizations can take? Chime in with your thoughts.

P.S. Hopefully, this post tells you that these discussions won’t necessarily or always be just about system configuration issues/settings, mappings, or technical objects!

Puneet Suppal Enterprise SOA Solutions & Innovation – Capgemini

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Café Innovation — SOA and the Offshore factor [Posted on Oct. 27, 2007 04:11 PM ]

I have recently returned from the SAP Insider hosted Managing Your SAP Projects 2007 and Global Environments 2007 event in Miami where I had an opportunity to speak about Taking your project offshore: The ABCs of when, why, and how. The event had numerous sessions on rollouts of SAP in all parts of the world. As I observed some of the sessions and delivered my own, it occurred to me that we ought to be engaging in a discussion about the dynamics of what comes out of throwing together SOA initiatives with strategies of offshore development. What role does offshoring play in the new age of SOA?

The story of the industrial revolution reveals that standardization and the means to share standardized parts and tools were important factors in its success. Once a piece of hardware that was needed in essential machinery could be specified in uniformly understood terms, this could then be sourced from anywhere. The ability to conduct commerce over large physical distances solved the logistics of getting a part from point A to point B. The next step was to look at manufacturing wherever the most significant cost advantage was to be had. So today, a product designed in Austin can be manufactured in Tijuana or Shanghai, or a product designed in India can perhaps be built in the Czech Republic. Perhaps the evolution of the SOA world could benefit from these experiences and trends, and consequently emulate the successes already achieved in the industrial world.

Standards are a key when we look at creating and using services across platforms. This is essential to realize the full potential of SOA. We do know that there are standards, and then there are standards! Over time this aspect should become less of a factor if there is more convergence in the discussions around standards. Beyond standards, what is needed is a way to share this. Unlike the burden of having to figure out how to transcend physical distances, electronic sharing is a lot easier as we have experienced in recent years. Since work flows well across continents and oceans today, there isn’t a challenge around sharing. In fact, the use of offshore teams continues to grow and we are witnessing new dynamics. While the U.S. continues to leverage offshoring in a very big way, with Europe stepping up its usage as well, India, traditionally on the other side of the coin, is looking to add another dimension to offshoring. Wipro Chairman, Azim Premji, was quoted last month as saying that he was considering centers in Virginia and Idaho, in addition to Georgia! One can see how all these trends might co-exist, even harmoniously, in the commoditized arena of application development and maintenance. However, what makes matters somewhat complex is the nature and promise of SOA.

The question that needs to be answered is how can offshoring assist in the use of SOA for its true calling – that is, to deliver innovation that aids in bringing a new process, a new model or a new capability into being that can deliver significant revenue advantage or noticeable cost savings. This is important because SOA initiatives are being held out as vehicles of innovation – innovation that will yield competitive advantage for an organization or help it fight off the advances of predators! This is an important consideration because traditionally, offshoring has worked best in the context of clear, coherent, well-documented, well-scripted tasks. Tasks requiring heavy user-interaction or out-of-the-box creativity have typically been considered not-so-good candidates to be offshored. While these perceptions are changing, the push for innovative business processes will demand very strong business knowledge as well as the ability to interact with users quite intensely.

Numerous organizations have committed millions to utilizing offshore services to build and run applications that support critical business processes. Now the challenge before them is how to deliver SOA-based innovation in a cost-effective and repeatable manner. Can they leverage the advantages of offshoring effectively? What are the barriers? What are the critical success factors?

Puneet Suppal Enterprise SOA Solutions & Innovation – Capgemini

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Café Innovation – Business Processes and the Facebook Phenomenon [Posted on Nov. 15, 2007 08:19 AM]

As we move into the holiday season many of us will be engaging in various social activities….perhaps it is appropriate that we have a discussion around social networking!  

Over these past few days I have had some interesting conversations with some 18- to 24-year olds about this topic (…and, it is important we pay attention to this age-group because they are shaping the business environment for the next decade and beyond). The world has certainly changed since I was in that age group! Text messaging via mobile phones, and using Instant messaging on the go (via mobile devices) seem very second nature to this group, as does one other activity that had me intrigued when I first encountered it over a year ago – interacting via Facebook. A lot has been written – and this continues to get attention – on the Gen Y effect on society and the business world. There is also considerable ongoing discussion of the effect this has when interwoven with the effect of Web 2.0 technology capabilities. So I won’t go into that aspect here. In this post, I would like to help stimulate discussion, in the context of daily interaction, around the actual impact in the business world that these capabilities and trends could potentially have.

While I was having these conversations with those who are an active part of the Facebook culture, I was reminded of a headline that I had come across earlier: Facebook ‘Fad’ Spreads to Corporate Campuses (Jon Swartz, USA Today, 10/03/07). In this article, the discussion is around the fact that the “social networking site Facebook has attracted legions of users linked by common interests, and that makes Facebook an attractive target for the industry’s leaders. Companies such as Microsoft, Yahoo and Google have been looking to invest in — or even buy — Facebook in order to advance their online advertising interests.” This article (http://www.ecommercetimes.com/story/social-networking/59621.html) goes on to discuss the motivation for these marquee names to leverage the popularity of Facebook mainly to drive advertising revenues. The question that  we can start to consider is whether something like Facebook has a significant application inside an organization to facilitate a business process. And, if it does, what that might look like?

Do you have processes that suffer today for lack of appropriate attention from the key stakeholders because there isn’t an easy way for them to build consensus by communing? Have you experienced on the one hand, the need to have a community focus on key issues in your organization, and on the other hand the need to do this easily by building on common interests? Do you have a workforce that increasingly appears to take easily to the Facebook-like channels? Will a social networking channel boost such processes? Or, as some companies feel today, will it be a drag on productivity? What are the security risks that such activity might present? What are the potential regulatory (e.g., Sarbanes-Oxley) considerations? Could a Facebook-like channel address some of the collaboration concerns while balancing the need to satisfy productivity and regulatory demands?

Please chime in with your thoughts on the social networking aspects that might have an impact on your business processes.

P.S. I am off to Bangalore in about 10 days to present at SAP Tech Ed ’07 in that city. My next post will likely be upon my return in the first week of December (… or thereabouts). Happy Thanksgiving!

Puneet Suppal Enterprise SOA Solutions & Innovation – Capgemini

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Café Innovation — SOA and global capabilities [Posted on Dec. 06, 2007 06:59 PM]

I have recently returned from SAP Tech Ed ’07 in Bangalore. It was a uniquely festive conference – in keeping with the cultural environment of the host country! The energy inside the conference venue was something to be experienced! The responsiveness of the audience at the sessions – lecture and community, both – was quite impressive. One could not but help recognize that the SAP practitioners in India were essentially not much different than their counterparts in North America. They were very much in tune with how things are evolving in the SAP world and specially with respect to SOA. Their desire to actually make things happen was quite remarkably clear.

A few weeks ago I had posted a piece on SOA and the Offshore factor asking the question about the role offshoring might play in the new age of SOA. I believe that the world of IT is ready for us to scale the next peak, that of leveraging true global capabilities. Here it is important to note that typically, North America and Europe have tended to assign the repetitive, the predictable, and the easily governed tasks offshore with a view to taking advantage of labor cost differentials.

If we are to successfully deploy SOA based solutions leveraging overseas workforces, we would have to stop viewing them as a means of only cost reduction / saving. We must recognize that in these each of these locations, there is a workforce that is evolving in terms of skills, and abilities, where they can handle more than the routine and the mundane. As they get to flex their creative muscle in local markets, they will further hone these abilities. Organizations that recognize this and jump ahead of the curve, to not only encourage this trend but foster an environment to grow it actively, are the ones that will win in creating true global work forces in this arena – where an architect assigned to an effort in Austin, Texas,  could be from Boston, Berlin, or Bangalore. Eventually, this will not only yield a sustainable way to leverage the skills and talents on other continents, but also provide robust global ability to drive innovation. This is an essential consideration for all those organizations that seek to drive advantage in the marketplace through innovation – we have to leverage our global abilities to make this happen in a repeatable manner, for occasional serendipitous innovation can only bring occasional success. Obviously, there is considerable work to be done on numerous fronts to realize this outcome, but I believe this is part of the answer to the questions I had raised in the previous post (SOA and the Offshore factor).

Puneet Suppal Enterprise SOA Solutions & Innovation – Capgemini

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Café Innovation – SOA and the new role of IT [Posted on Dec. 19, 2007 12:09 PM]

In my inaugural post I had referenced a column in the SAP NetWeaver magazine (Fall 2007) that spoke of the disconnect between business and IT. Taking the discussion further, the most recent article in this column (http://www.netweavermagazine.com/archive/Volume_04_(2008)/Issue_01_(Winter)/v4i1a04.cfm?session=) challenges organizations to revisit and rethink the IT role.

This is important because the changing IT world and the global environment demand that computing should become increasingly flexible and nimble. If on the one hand we need the necessary stability and robustness to provide a solid platform from which to execute business-critical transactions, then on the other hand it is important to provide business users the ability to interact, collaborate and take advantage of community resources. IT can help bridge the sometimes conflicting demands. However, this requires a shift in approach.

In rethinking its role and re-applying itself to the corporate cause, IT can make a difference.

I invite you to check out the article (link above) in the Winter 2008 issue of the SAP NetWeaver magazine. Please share your comments.

Puneet Suppal Enterprise SOA Solutions & Innovation – Capgemini

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The above posts and comments appeared as blog posts for the BPX Community. They can be accessed at:

https://www.sdn.sap.com/irj/sdn/weblogs?blog=/pub/u/251786793