DaveBirchall.com on Business Technology

Archive for March, 2009

I say, I say…

Whilst this sounds like the start of a really weird Tommy Cooper joke, there’s also serious side to this question and it could be the saving grace for a lot of Australian Businesses as conditions are widely speculated to worsen in the short to mid term.

I’ve had a really interesting and busy few weeks which is why I’ve fallen quiet on the blogging front and I’ll tell you why…

Solentive’s growth has come about largely through network marketing and word of mouth referrals, but given the launch of our new software accelerator offering (SEBA), I decided to get proactive and to talk to a select few CFO’s about our approach.

Before I tell you about the findings of those conversations, I want to share with you some statistics that also surfaced in the same week.

1) Business Process Automation (BPA)  – Some research on Business Process Management outlined that simply mapping a business process without attempting to refine it can achieve cost savings of 12% in itself. Further cost savings of up to 40% can be acheived by taking a further step of automating them or by taking a continuous process improvement approach

2) At IBM’s Sydney technology showcase, the keynote was paying close attention to business agility in 2009. According to their lead consultant, business agility is directly linked to business performance. Respondents of their survey who claimed that they had the ability to respond quickly in 2009 were also identified to be the top performing companies.

Whilst both of these statements are important in their own right, the fact is they both of these statements were made in isolation to each other and it would have been really nice to see someone actually have the eureka! moment that I was hanging out for.

What’s important to recognise now is the powerful relationship between BPA and the ability to bed these re-engineered processes down quickly (business agility.) After all,what good is a full audit of your business process in order to cut costs if by the time it takes to write the software, the business environment or even the business has moved on? Business Agility and Business Process engineering must go hand in hand.

Long time subscribers to this blog will know that BPA and the rapid development of software have long been a theme of my blogs ramblings and the core competence of Solentive. It’s not enough to consider what is the best approach to take in a slow down but its essential to enable your systems with incredible business agility in the future in order to thrive.

What started out as a pioneering approach to agile development has now taken a quantum leap in the form of our accelerator. SEBA stands for Solentive Enterprise Business Process and Workflow Accelerator and it has already been used in a wide variety of implementations.

This week we announced, what is essentially our secret to lean delivery knowing that the timing is right for CFO’s to look at both BPA and business agility in tandem. (www.solentive.com/seba). SEBA takes all of the most essential components of a successful enterprise software delivery and combines them in one package as a ‘chassis’ for your software project. Before a line of code has been written for your development, your project already has modules such as systems jobs, business rules, service bus, business objects, reporting and authentication. Business processes and workflows are written not in code but in a separate management application in a fraction of the time.

The custom software versus off the shelf debate is now finally over. There is a new middle ground which takes the best of both approaches with practically none of the negatives.

So what did CFO’s make of this? Well it seems like a hit! Now there is a way to reduce overheads without compromising business performance and the results can be achieved and realised more quickly than ever.

More information on the accelerator can be found at www.solentive.com/seba