Posts Tagged Business Process Management
Business Process Integration is key to IT-Savvy Companies
There is an excellent interview in the MIT Sloan Management Review and also carried by Wall Street Journal on Nov 30th.
In this article, Dr. Peter Weill is interviewed and he has recently co-authored the book “IT Savvy: What Top Executives Must Know to Go From Pain to Gain”. Dr. Weill believes that companies can increase the effectiveness of their IT investments by treating Information Technology as a strategic asset.
This article really hit home with our team at Adeptia because it articulates exactly the benefits of Business Process Integration that we make to our customers and prospects. Some of the key points (paraphrased) made by Dr. Weill are:
- IT-savvy companies use their technology to reduce costs today by standardizing and digitizing their core processes.
- IT-savvy companies are 21% more profitable than non-IT-savvy companies for two reasons: One is that IT-savvy companies have identified the best way to run their core day-to-day processes. The second thing is that IT-savvy companies are faster to market with new products and services that are add-ons, because their innovations are so much easier to integrate than in a company with siloed technology architecture. Those are the two sources of their greater profitability: lower costs for running existing business processes, and faster innovation.
- When we talk about an operating model, we’re talking about the degree to which a company integrates and standardizes its core processes. Integration, which involves providing access to data across the company, and standardization, which involves reducing variation in the company’s business processes, are the two things IT does better than anything else.
- The real secret to IT-savvy companies is that each project links together—like Lego blocks—to create a reusable platform. IT-savvy companies think reuse first.
We ourselves could not have said it better.
Add comment December 6, 2009
The new, new thing – Next-Gen SaaS Integration
Document: Adeptia Unveils Next Generation SaaS Integration Solution . (1 page, 5 mins to review).
Traditional SaaS integration solutions have focused on just moving data in and out of SaaS applications. This approach may be fine for some scenarios such as data migration, reporting or synchronization. However, it is quite limiting because real world business problems require users to interact with data flows to review information, make decisions and route tasks. So, Adeptia has extended its existing SaaS Integration solution to allow SaaS applications to be integral part of customer’s business process flows.
For example, an order management process may require moving orders from Salesforce.com to an on-premise ERP system when a sale is completed and order won. However, this process would typically require workflow steps for business users to review and configure the order. A process flow such as this with multiple user workflow steps can be easily and rapidly configured in Adeptia. Adeptia offers an SOA-based, code-free approach with built-in connectivity to many SaaS applications such as Salesforce and NetSuite.
Data integration market has evolved over the last few years as more and more companies have realized that the business problems they were trying to solve by implementing data bridges did not really do the full job. Most problems require solutions that are more complex than just moving the bits and bytes. They require the data to be validated before it can be processed, errors need to be handled, notifications sent automatically on exceptions, information presented to business users to review and make decisions etc. etc. These solutions quickly grow beyond the capabilities of typical “integration products”.
Complete solutions require flexibility to handle various situations and scenarios and this typically requires a process-centric, services-based technology that includes human workflow capability. Integration-centric process management products, such as Adeptia, are best suited for these situations.
1 comment November 17, 2008
