Corporate Portals Asia Conference
Guglielmo, Eugene 19nn – 20nn
Curiosity. Business Divisions desire “best-of-breed” technologies to optimize their operations. Over time, new business needs will arise and today’s best-of-breed may become obsolete. How does the Company respond to changes in emerging business needs that may require changes in emerging technology? Essentially, how does the Company design for agility?
Creativity. The corporate design needs to accommodate plug-n-play technology, which is based on standardization of interfaces, similar to the standardization that allows plug-n-play USB devices. Most major software product suites, such as Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), Business Intelligence (BI), Customer Relationship Management (CRM), etc. utilize both proprietary and standardized interfaces. The proprietary, back-door, interfaces connect the suite for performance making it more difficult to introduce “best-of-breed” when business needs evolve.
Realizing that the corporate know-how and its business advantage is driven by what information is exchanged through those interfaces is the key to agility. As such, the only one that can protect the know-how is the company itself. This realization necessitates the use of the standardized, front-door, interfaces to overcome some, if not most of the, proprietary ones. Taking ownership of the interfaces must be done by the company itself, which requires customized software and a business-focused information technology staff that are subject-matter experts in the way the business operates. An example of this is the familiar custom device-driver software that is installed on your computer when a new device is connected for the first time.
Invention. The concepts described above are not by any means news. The diagram shown is an architectural design to accomplish agility. The ETL (Extraction, Tranformation, and Load) components are fundamentally “liaisons”, translating from one language to another, like a device driver. The BUS (middleware) are the messaging service, the USB connector and cable. The green lines represent the front-door means to exchange information. This design was put into production at a corporate level to support 24/7 manufacturing and enable the company to offer new capabilities through internal development and acquired capabilities through mergers and acquisitions (M&A). Implementation. Java, a middleware platform for the BUS, and relational database platform for the ETL. A close-up is shown below.
