Well I’m back with some more ideas and thoughts about Web 2.0, the enabling technologies driving it, and the potential benefits for enterprises. I tend to focus on the technologies and the enterprise aspect of Web 2.0 simply because I get tired (am tired) of people defining it as simply a “social collaborative” movement. Although this is true, and great for my girlfriend who can blog and share her photos, this says little to the strategic impact that the underlying technologies, that make capable the social aspects, can have on the enterprise. Here are a few real universal business situations or rather timeless barriers to a better bottom line that technologies such as Ajax, Mashups, and a SOA can positively affect.
Quickly adapt to Changing Business Needs.
When organizations mandate a business process rule, such as a limit on the size of a particular type of business transaction, it is typically embedded deep within the application code. Finding, adjusting, and maintaining consistency with other systems can be error-prone and extremely time consuming and error-prone processes. By deploying such rules in a separate but integrated environment, organizations can empower business executives via a user interface to achieve extreme agility and oversight.
Effectively Monitor and Continuously Improve the Business
Systems information and transactional flows capture critical interactions that may be required for financial, contractual, regulatory, and business governance. Tracing and reporting audit data are tedious tasks and tenuously contingent on predefined conditions, including monitoring servers and client devices, coding predetermined subroutines to capture processing metrics, running batch routines for replication and reporting, and so forth. Due to the complexity of pulling this information together across a whole business process, the effort is often only made when critical issues arise. To avoid business risk, ongoing monitoring can be automatically captured by the abstracted process layer, which can trigger alerts, alternate process flows, provide automated reporting, and expose many other intelligence metrics. By reacting to early warnings a business can preempt situations that may cause undue and costly mistakes. Organizations may also seek to implement Six Sigma or regulatory initiatives via this type on mechanism.
Simplify Business Integration Efforts
Integration points that are incorporated and managed in close context to specific business processes will provide significantly more value. In the example, enterprise procurement activities are often scattered across multiple systems, where the collating, parsing, and regrouping of items to be sourced are typically very manual and labor-intensive processes. However, these processes can be centralized and automated into a composite application or mashup that avoids these inefficiencies.
Reduce Costs and Risks of Manual Processing
Many organizations still struggle trying to automate manual or paper-based transactions. Highly document-intensive composite application processes are very common targets for Web services. In the procurement example, a user may intervene in multiple places, introducing the potential to corrupt the process flow. With an orchestrated composite application, automated triggers engage users where and when necessary, removing the need for each individual to know every activity in the process required to continue the flow of a specific transaction.
Leverage Existing Systems and Resources
Reusability of code not only saver resource efforts in development and maintenance, it also impacts application quality and security. By utilizing a standardized framework, companies can focus skills development across a variety of systems and solutions to prevent these effects.
Again, these are just a few examples but I and JackBe believe it is these types of scenarios that are not as highly publicized at the moment (overshadowed by the Youttube/myspace buzz) but will at the end of the day drive real business value to the mass.
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