by John Parker | Jun 7, 2012 | Business Analysis, Uncategorized |
Business Analysts face new challenges in a rapidly evolving world of software solutions. Packaged software, such as ERP and CRM systems, and Software as a Service (SaaS) are becoming the “go to” answer for business problems as they can almost always be implemented more rapidly and more cost effectively than custom solutions. In addition, there are many tools available for both personal computers and via the cloud that business units of many organizations are buying and implementing as a means to bypass IT. The trend is clear; organizations are doing less and less custom software development. Instead of building custom software from scratch, organizations are finding tools and customizing them. The Consumerization of IT and BYOD (Bring Your Own Device (e.g., iPad) are major trends that Corporate IT departments may want to stop, but simply will not be able to. Many of the worst offenders are senior level mangers who don’t care what the CIO or the IT Department think. They want quick results for their business unit and are wiling to implement a tool, pay for it with OPEX, and completely bypass IT. These trends have a significant impact on the role of the business analyst and will require business analysts to adapt the requirement process. Some may take the stance that the BA should be agnostic, and not take part in design or in selection of implementation tool. However, I believe that it is the BA’s job to help the business find the best solution to solve a business problem. Tools are working software and ready to be used. The best solution to resolve a business problem may...
by John Parker | Apr 9, 2012 | Business Analysis, Uncategorized |
Every business can be understood as sequences of events whether the business delivers packages, provides patient care, processes complicated financial trades, or manufactures a product. However, events, whether planned or unplanned, often disrupt the best-designed and managed business processes, which then impact the business results. Management of events is becoming thoroughly ingrained in business processes. Often it is addressed under different labels: business activity monitoring (BAM), complex event processing (CEP), event stream processing (ESP), event-driven architecture (EDA), and more. Although companies already do event processing every day, the effort is often disjointed, fragmented and improvised. To be more responsive, businesses must be able to identify events when they happen and take appropriate action. Increasingly, business rules built into integrated information systems are used to manage how events are handled. Event Stream Processing (ESP) is a set of technologies designed to build event-driven information systems. ESP technologies include event visualization, event databases, event-driven middleware, and event processing languages, or complex event processing (CEP). The terms ESP and CEP are often used interchangeably, although CEP seems to now be the more fashionable term CEP focuses on the task of processing multiple streams of event data with the goal of identifying the meaningful events within those streams, employing techniques such complex pattern recognition, event correlation and abstraction, event hierarchies, and relationships between events such as causality, membership, and timing, and event-driven processing. CEP enables applications such as algorithmic trading in financial services, RFID event processing applications, fraud detection, process monitoring, and location-based services in telecommunications. Complex event processing software aggregates information from distributed systems in real time and applies rules to discern...
by John Parker | Mar 26, 2012 | Business Analysis, Uncategorized |
Many organizations are beginning to use ‘mashups’ to create enterprise applications. Mashups allow organizations to rapidly implement new functionality via the use of web technologies, content from multiple data sources, reusable user interface components, and loosely coupled services. Many consumer and social sites have used mashups for some time. However, enterprises are just beginning to reap the benefits afforded by mashups. Mashups create an extremely agile and dynamic design and implementation environment within the enterprise realm, thereby allowing IT and advanced users with some technical skills to develop powerful and useful applications and services. Generally, three categories of items can be mashed together: Presentation (user interface artifacts) Data Process (application functionality) Mashups combine data from disparate data sources, existing UI artifacts, and/or existing software processes or services. The specific design for a mashup depends on whether the mashup will be visual or nonvisual. Mashups are often assembled using HTML snippets, on-demand JavaScript to access an external API, web service APIs, RSS feeds, and other data to be mixed and mashed within the application. Mashups also enable users to quickly integrate disparate data using rich data formats that don’t require complex programming and middleware technologies. Mashups are generally created ad hoc. However, an enterprise mashup must heed a more restrictive set of considerations such as privacy, authentication, governance, compliance, standards, security, and other business-related issues that public domain mashups are often free to ignore. In addition, enterprise mashups often restrict access to certain types of intellectual property and/or protected information. This is similar to the issues that organizations that use SOA face when exposing service APIs to the web community....
by John Parker | Feb 24, 2012 | Business Analysis, Uncategorized |
Open web is term being batted around to describe the movement of web technologies to open standards and technologies. The move to Open Web has been gradual, but has now gained sufficient momentum that it will continue into the future. Open Web is more that just a set of technologies, it is also a community and a culture. Today’s web technologies such as HTML4, Adobe Flash, Microsoft Silverlight, Simple Object Access Protocol [SOAP] web services, Java EE, and .NET are gradually being replaced with open web technologies. While HTML5 is the best known, Open Web technologies also include JavaScript (client and server), CSS3, Representational State Transfer (REST), and mobile frameworks such as jQuery Mobile, among others. Even though lack of support for Flash on the iPad severely damaged the Adobe Flash market, it appears likely that wide adoption of HTML5 will end Adobe Flash and Microsoft Silverlight for good. Even though at the moment HTML5 may not be as powerful as Flash or Silverlight for digital rights management or video streaming, it will soon catch them. It is clear that HTML5 standards and technologies are advancing rapidly enough to drive the next evolution of cross-platform rich Internet applications REST (Representational State Transfer ) is a set of principles that define how Web standards, such as HTTP and URIs, should be used. Adhering to REST principles will lead your organization to a broader, resource-oriented architecture and management platform. RESTful APIs are quickly replacing SOAP as the new standard. RESTful APIs embrace the five key REST principles listed below. Give every “thing” an ID Link things together Use standard methods Permit...
by John Parker | Feb 10, 2012 | Business Analysis, Uncategorized |
CIOs and business units are struggling to decide how and to what extent to use social technology in their businesses, even though it offers considerable promise. A key reason is that a majority of social media outside the enterprise is just pure communication. Organizations have struggled to see how applications such as Facebook or twitter can provide tangible benefits to the organization. Also, employing these tools inside the enterprise imposes additional complexity and challenges on already overwhelmed staff. Social technology must be woven into the existing IT fabric so as to help users gain efficiencies in business processes, access key information for decisions, and capture knowledge that can be managed and shared with others. To gain enterprise acceptance, social technology, like any other enterprise software proposition, needs to have business drivers. However, unlike many applications that provide tangible process efficiencies apparent to everyone, social technology benefits are often seen as a bit “squishy.” Younger generations inherently know the benefit of social technologies, but clearly some education of senior leadership and business stakeholders may be needed to earn their buy-in to the benefits of social technologies. In doing so, it is important to highlight a number of tangible benefits made possible by social tools. Staying Connected – Social networking provides an easy way to stay in touch with co-workers, customers and suppliers. During 2011, there were more Facebook messages sent than there were emails. People feel more connected and informed with social media than with many other methods of communication. For means of communication – Social technology provides an excellent mechanism for communicating. It is seen by many people as...
