What do you get when you combine BPA with ultra accelerated software development?

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

Ensuring a lean delivery in Insurance Industry Software

Many software companies have targeted the insurance industry with a software product offering in the last few years. These software products are able to be taken off the shelf and seemingly dropped into production.

The apparent speed of deployment can be appealing to a business that is striving to get things done and kick goals in the shortest time frame possible. The lure of such a solution can be all the more appealing when the other option is a custom software project which (as reputation would lead you to belief) can take several months to design build and then test. Although the custom software approach would inevitably lead to a better fit for the business, efficiency is sacrificed for the sake of apparent speed of deployment.

This view of insurance industry software is to my mind far too simplistic and fails to take into account a best of both worlds approach which has been developed and refined in recent years.

Every insurance company is different. By their nature, they need to be different in order to gain competitive advantage over their competitors. The way risk is calculated, premiums and pricing are calculated are all highly specialised and are often updated and refined on a frequent basis.

BA’s, Risk Managers and Actuary’s need to be able to make changes to such calculations without having to add to the work load of IT managers. Long and convoluted change management processes simply become an unnecessary stumbling block for a department focused on getting things done. By the same token, the IT team can be hesitant to give untrained personnel access to business logic in a business critical system.

The solution lies in using a Business Rules Management System (BRMS) to seperate out the business logic and make it accessible to the people that need it. Rules or sets of rules can be locked down using role based security to prevent unauthorised changes to business logic. As well as speeding up the change request process, a collaborative approach to business logic can then harnessed allowing the business to catapult into a new realm of business agility.

In addition to all this, the software development cycle is significantly reduced, allowing insurance businesses to reap the benefits of their investment sooner.

A BRMS approach to insurance industry software allows you to enjoy the benefits of off the shelf software (rapid deployment, stable code base,) with all the benefits of custom software. (efficiency, fit, usability, performance)

To find out more about how BRMS can work for you, register for our forthcoming the webinar at

http://www.solentive.com/software-events.html

Be smart - Do more with less.

A business is often only considered as good as its processes and procedures but all too often this can get neglected as other seemingly more important tasks compete for our attention.

Interestingly, the very act of documenting our processes is step towards automating some of those business processes and decreasing our reliance on individual staff members. A sound approach towards business process mapping, whilst considering factors such as scalability and repeatability, combined with the right technology can make a profound difference to the operating profits of a business.

At the moment, business confidence is at an all time low and some companies are halting all spending on non essential projects.

I’m challenging the logic of that. Some of the work that we have done recently has allowed our customers to double the effectiveness of the workforce but has cost the business the rough equivalent of 1.5 X FTE. The remaining staff were twice as effective and are likely to have more job security as a result.

Using SEBA, we were able to get the system into product in a fraction of the time. Now is a time to be spending conservatively and wisely and maximising ROI.

http://www.solentive.com/custom-software-framework.html

Putting a Premium on Risk Management

Earmarked for the 6th March, our online event takes insurance industry IT management through some of the concepts of using Business Rules Management Systems.

By separating some of the business logic into a rules engine, Insurance companies can take greater control of their IT and fast track the process of change management and save money along the way.

The insurance industry is also able to make use of the theory of Complex event processing, which we also hope to cover off.

Registration is free but limited to

1) Business Analysts
2) Senior IT Management
3) Risk Managers
4) Actuarys
5) Finances

To register, visit

http://www.solentive.com/software-events.html

An Ultra Accelerated Approach to Custom Software Development and why it may be just what you are looking for.

So the news is not good. Apart from the obvious feelings of a new beginning (President Obama’s inaugoration) that is being projected by our US friends, the rest of the world seems a little less hopeful at least for the short term. Australia gained around 10,000 new people on the unemployment figures yesterday as BHP and Rio Tinto announced their various reforms and a global technology giant announced global redundancies in their thousands. To state the bledding obvious, everyones chief concern is about survival at the moment.

It’s a time to be focused on our objectives, make few mistakes and get results as quickly as we can. When it comes to IT projects, it’s important not only to get a return on investment but to get that return quickly. Its maybe for this reason that my company seems to be bucking the trend and doing steady business whilst other vendors seems to be slowing down. Our accelerated approach to custom software is able to play a vital role in the survival of businesses across Australia as budgets get tightened, and we are expected to do more with less.

So if you are unfamiliar with our approach, I’ll take you through the highlights.

Before I describe what it is. I’ll tell you what its not.

So what is it then?

Solentive have developed an ‘ultra accelerator’ that allows us to deliver reliable, innovative solutions in a fraction of the time that other developers can. The ultra accelerator can be used on practically any workflow oriented application and comes with native connectivity technology (BUS) to facilitate the integration with other systems.

The approach ‘displaces’ a mountain of engineering effort by using the ultra accelerator, where other companies would normally be piecing code together or writing code from scratch. Further customization can then be performed to tailor the solution to your specific requirements.

Further to all this, our customers benefit from a very stable code base, user acceptance testing is minimised and the system is fast tracked to production.

Business processes can be automated or largely automated meaning with rules engine technology and workflow design tools so the potential for a huge return on investment is also available. For the price of a standard approach to your project, we are able to include reporting and SLA monitoring tools to ensure that your workforce is always on task and you are able to identify leakage in your productivity. Do more with less! No really!

We have enjoyed some great implementations for our customers so I thought it may be interesting to share our approach.

If a jobs worth doing its worth doing well and its worth doing now!

Do you have project? A question about software development? Are you lonely or bored and just fancy a chat ?

The door is always open as they say.

Kevin Kelly on the Semantic Web

We live with the machine all around
There is one machine
We share, we receive
The web is its OS
All screen link into the one
Let the one read it the one is us.

Some great concepts covered here including cloud computing, semantics and more. There are also some astonishing facts on offer along the way. 5000 days of internet….

http://au.youtube.com/watch?v=J132shgIiuY

Eric Schmidt on the difference between Web 2.0 and Web 3.0

So I am looking around on You Tube to see what is being said about the semantic web. I will post some of the videos online as I find them. I am not sure where the term Web 3.0 came from but its certainly been accepted and it part of the road map for the web laid out by TBL some time ago.

This one is a good one to start you off if you new to it.

To Outsource or not to Outsource - To me there is no question.

I recently came across a particularly damning forum thread where its users seem to have had all manner of negative experiences in dealing with IT ‘outsourcers’ I simply had to wade in with what I thought was a fairer view of the world…

WOW!

I can’t believe some of the poor opinions of outsourcing. Its a real shock to me. Of course there are always some horror stories out there and you hear them more often than the success stories. I will attempt to bring what I feel is a more balanced view.

Here’s my thoughts from the point of view of someone who works for an ‘outsourcer’ (www.solentive.com)

For a start, ‘outsourcing’ is the wrong word for the sort of relationship that is going to work. If you think you can simply throw them a brief and look back at the project a few months later, then you are setting yourself up for failure. A successful project can be largely attributed to continuous engagement with the domain experts. What do I mean by this? Well, you don’t need to be technical to start a business, you need to have a sound knowledge of the market you’re operating in and how the business will run in that market. Your development team (inhouse or ‘outsourced’) need to be the experts in software development and can write the code to meet your business objectives.

Our engagement model required continuous feedback from our domain experts so perhaps that’s different from the way some people think about outsourcers?

So if the question is to outsource or not, here’s some high level considerations.

1) Do you have the experience to project manage a team in the context of software development?
2) Do you have the technology to work efficiently in a collaborative manner?
3) Are you happy not to benefit from code reuse and write most of the code yourself?
4) Does you team have the breadth of experience to create a lean delivery?
5) Does you team have a build master, lead developer, project manager, architect?
6) Do you use continuous integration software?
7) Can you afford to budget into the build for project tracking software?

Or would you prefer just to concentrate in offering direction and leadership to a team of people with all the fundamentals in place? Would you prefer that those cost is spread across some other customers.

The fact is that a good software development partnership acts like an in house team and most definitely has a stake in the project.Software development, like any project related field always has some element of risk. In 15 years, we have never had a customer experience what has been described on this forum. The reason is down to people and process. So its important to realise that there can be huge difference when it comes to who you trust, but DIY software development is not always the answer.

Happy New Year - Complexity is Good

Complexity is good

So I am back from my much needed break and doing some research beforethe year ramps up again. I was taking a look at the google enterprise technologies when I came across this. It made me smile so I guess you will like it too.

Creating and Maintaining Business Logic in Plain ENGLISH

Just a quick note of thanks to all those that joined us online for the webinar earlier in the week. It’s been great to see the level of response and interest around BRMS.

If you missed the session or if you would like to go through it again you can view it at

http://www.solentive.com/webinar-create-details.html

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