He contends that the IT industry has “lost sight of its primary goal of reducing information management costs” and allowed IT estates to become way too complex.

I agree and I know countless operational people, the customers of IT, who are exasperated not only at the complexity of their IT, but perhaps more importantly the amount of time and money it now takes to make even the simplest of changes.

Martin’s anecdotal evidence of people resorting to spreadsheet management, or “passing around bits of paper” is depressing and as he points out, not the answer.

The reason I am interested in this subject is that Blue Prism is pioneering a new concept in computing aimed at simplifying corporate IT and the way it is interpreted and used by the business.

Freeing the business operation to fulfil its own integration and automation needs, and start hammering the growing IT change list is one thing.  But doing that with workarounds like spreadsheets or bits of paper or hiring temporary staff is ungoverned, insecure and not exactly scalable.  Blue Prism proposes an IT supported software platform, supported by a thorough methodology that business users can work within to make sense of the complexity, improve service, manage ongoing change, and above all reduce costs.

We call this an Operational Agility Platform, but the idea of operational agility is far from limited to Blue Prism.  As Martin suggests, there is evidence of a movement emerging “a revolt is under way”.  I prefer to think of it in the passive voice as a revolution as I don’t support the notion that operational people are revolting!

I sacked Streamline nearly 12 months ago but now they are trying to debit my account for another year’s fees.  I have been forced to change my debit card to stop them.

I enquired about how to cancel my account using the customer service support ticket system on their website.  This is the system that, as a customer, is the only possible way of getting any response out of Streamline.net.

Now I no longer want to be a customer - guess what?  To close my account I have to call a premium rate number where, surprise surprise, I sit in a queue that costs me more than next year’s subscription.  No reply in 20 minutes.

Am I the only one that thinks this is shoddy?

According to a National Audit Office report, the Government considered winding Northern Rock down but IT systems would have struggled to return funds to savers in an appropriate time frame which could have caused another run on the bank.

This is a classic unplanned event.  A major change that requires a super rapid response.  In today’s world where the only certainty is uncertainty, how does a business plan for events that it cannot even contemplate or conceive right now?

A new level of flexibility is needed from tomorrow’s IT systems.  At Blue Prism we are delivering an Operational Agility Platform to various leaders in customer service helping to create an operational capability to manage change - both planned and unplanned.

The basic premise of the article is that whilst the hype around SOA is overblown (no, really?!) the fundamental concept is good.  So the solution is…….change the name to cloud computing and press on.

I have been pretty right wing in my views on SOA in the past but I do genuinely believe that the concept is brilliant.  It is delivery that is flawed and there are two good reasons for this:

1.  Organisations take on too big a challenge in trying to deliver a service oriented architecture.  Grand vision = grand design = big bang = big cost = big risk = failed project.  There has to be a more incremental way of getting to SOA.

2.  SOA projects are almost always run by IT people.  No wonder they never meet business requirements.  Put business leaders in charge and watch the priorities change.

I spend a large portion of my life talking to senior customer service professionals.  The common story is that they are tired of IT projects that don’t deliver, and IT departments that cannot respond to change at the speed of business.

Change happens!  New product launches, regulatory change, product promotions, merger/acquisition, processing errors.  Shouldn’t SOA be enabling the business to provide appropriate responses to such change?

If the principles of SOA are to succeed, it is not going to happen by nomenclature, or adding more layers of complexity.  IT professionals need to distil SOA into simpler, more incremental, more business focussed chunks, and empower the business with platforms that enable them to react to everyday change without the usual lead times.

I believe that the ability to make a business operation truly agile will be one of the defining competitive advantages of the next decade.

1. The credit crunch will continue to affect IT spending for 2008.  This will mean a trend away from major IT projects and smaller more incremental projects will be more in vogue.  A new born baby could have predicted this one but I certainly didn’t envisage the scale of the problem caused by Lehmans in September!
2. The length of time senior people stay in post is ever reducing.  This will continue to drive short termism and this will strengthen the enterprise resolve to look for incremental, rather than big bang change.  Executive bonuses are frequently paid against cost/income ratios or short term profits.  Major investments in large capital projects do not pay back in the required time period to fulfil bonus aspirations.  I don’t have any data on this but I sense it is even more pertinent right now as we stare gloomily into a “short term or bust” depression.
3. Software as a Service (SaaS) and the like will become increasingly adopted by the enterprise as business users vote with their feet on offerings from the internal IT department that are too slow, too expensive and too capital hungry.  Not sure about this one.  I probably expected more of my customers to move to salesforce.com for example.
4. Despite this, Web 2.0 technologies sold as Enterprise 2.0 (wikis, social networking, mashups et al) will be slower to take off despite the buzz.  Still agree here although very recently I’ve seen one or two people thinking a bit harder about internal social networking/KM etc.
5. SOA will continue to be hyped by the big vendors but successful case studies will still be slow to emerge.  Anyone who has a real genuine success story where a meaningful ROI was derived, please ping it over.
6. Enterprise IT departments will start to realise that they need to align themselves more closely with the business.  They are ideally positioned to advise the business on how to use all IT, whether internal or external, built or purchased, collaborative or silo based.  The IT function will hopefully start to be seen as a trusted adviser rather than an obstructive gatekeeper.  I have sadly seen little evidence of this in the UK.  I have sincere hopes for 2009.
7. The percentage of IT budget spent on compliance issues will increase, especially in UK financial services where CCA 2006, MiFID, TCF (Treating Customers Fairly) and SOX, for example, will all feature.  In retail banking right now, compliance/legal seems to be the only reason for budget approval of a project.
8. Security will remain a critical issue and automatically features right at the top of every CIO agenda. Because of various high profile customer data leaks in 2007, data protection will be a big ticket initiative in many large organisations.  Another one that anyone with damp ear behinds could have predicted - related to compliance (above)
9. The green agenda will gather momentum with all organisations attaching increased importance to social and environmental responsibility. “Green computing” will be one of the hyped phrases of 2008.  The phrase was hyped but once the credit crunch started to bite, green credentials slip down the list behind business survival.
10. And finally, I hope Blue Prism will continue to grow rapidly, serving and adding value for all its stakeholders: Customers; staff; business partners; investors and government (taxes).  Happy to report a record year of profitable growth.

In today’s complex business world, front and back office customer service operations have to contend with a non-stop barrage of change.  Whereas traditional IT projects deliver systems against timescales measured in years, human beings on the front line have to react to events happening right now, today.

The long term IT strategy is generally based on what is known today with some future forecast factored in.  The business users, though, have little more idea of what is coming tomorrow than the poor EA faced with a blank sheet of paper.  Of course, the major systems still need to exist, CRM, core operational software, billing and collections etc.  It’s just that when these systems are conceived they have to be designed with a “best guess” of future requirements and this results in range of functions available to the front line that is then frozen in time.

The problem with this approach is that operational staff might need to do something new.  A merger or acquisition creates process duplication; a new product launch requires operational support with sketchy forecasts of process volumes; management want to push a certain product whilst sunsetting another; a processing error needs quickly reversing.

One of our customers had a processing problem caused by a mail strike.  Several thousand accounts were debited with a late payment penalty whilst the cheques really were “in the post”.  A decision was taken to refund these payments (very noble - glad I am a customer of this organisation!).  When the customer accounting system was designed, nobody thought that there might be a bulk requirement to selectively cancel debits applied to a range of accounts.  The traditional way of solving this problem is to take a few call centre agents off the phones for a few weeks to process these refunds manually.  With Blue Prism software the team was able to quickly piece together a new automated process flow that required no human involvement and the process was completed in one day.

Here’s the science bit.  Blue Prism retrospectively componentises the existing and legacy apps and allows you to re-purpose them into new operational scenarios and business processes.  Using point and click integration techniques (no code required), new methods can be clicked together into a process flow using a simple flowchart interface.  This gives operational staff the means to manage and react to short term change and therefore operational agility is enhanced.

Sounds like similar objectives to BPM/SOA?  Possibly some.  Except we are talking about delivery in days and weeks, not months and years.  I’ll go into more detail on this in a later post.

It’s amazing how much hard work goes into designing and building a website and, not least, writing the copy.  We have also taken some important design decisions such as dropping the prism widget from the logo:

Personally I quite liked the old prism and sorry to see it go, but I was the only one who held that view.  Democracy eh?

On more serious matters, working out who you are, who your customers are, and what the message that connects those two things is weighty stuff and takes time in the world of enterprise software.

We are not 100% there yet, but we are moving in the right direction and we are hopefully taking steps to look like a larger, more serious company as we are emerging from early stage into growth mode.

What used to worry me is that I expected to crack all these problems overnight.  Learning with our early customers, listening to them, getting independent people to listen to them, and taking a bit of time to think both introvertly and extrovertly has been most helpful.

Talking to customers teaches us not only about who we are and how to connect, but also enables us to examine how we deliver.

This is not just benefiting our sales team, but also our new customers coming on board, who can take advantage of previous experience, methodologies and working practices, and new ways in which Blue Prism software can be used.

The website is in final testing and should go live next week at www.blueprism.com.

Talking of website upgrades, I have moved this blog to a new ISP and upgraded to Wordpress 2.5.1 - big improvement!

The journalist was testing the hypothesis that the young were more likely to ignore IT rules, because they were used to Googling their required phrase and then downloading some freeware to solve the problem.  Now, we Brits are renowned for our love of queues and obeying rules, and that is my actual experience of enterprise life.  The pent up frustration of the users transcends genders and generations, but here in the UK we observe the rule book.

Where rogue IT is implemented, it is just as often an old school person who authorises it.  IT departments are getting more adept at clamping down on rogue IT like SaaS, social networking and Excel (I know more than one company that bans Excel).  But the well of desire from the business users is gradually tipping the balance of power in favour of the business.  This is, of course, unfair on IT who are measured on governance, resilience, security and compliance.

When the spat reaches the board room, more often than not, the business is winning the battle based purely on ROI.  Is this good in the long term?  IT argues that chickens will come home to roost.  As to the age gap, is there more likelihood of younger people to break the rules than older?  In my experience, not in the UK.

I regularly exchange emails with retired friends and relatives.  Everyone is becoming tech savvy these days.  IT needs to provide business agility or all business people will find it for themselves.

I am not sure how many swivel chairs it would take before Sean would see an automated approach as more suitable.  I’ve certainly seen banks of people doing little more than this type of business process, inconsistently and with plenty of errors - in itself a very expensive way of doing things.  I do, however, take his point and this is not a criticism of what is essentially an excellent post that raises a number of important points.

For me, the most important point Sean raises is that “if you cannot build a new end-to-end business process that covers both systems manually then you do not understand the requirements sufficiently to start coding it.”

These thoughts are also picked up by Reg Braithwaite in an equally excellent post Is software the documentation of business process mistakes?  Reg argues that if your code represents the “user manual” of the business process, then if the code is too complex, this may well be because the process is too complex.  In other words, get the manual process right before you automate it.

The only reason swivel chair integration exists is because of the inflexibility afforded to the business user by the existing systems.  Business users are left with manual as the only option available to them.  It is the quickest, cheapest and most reliable way of getting a business process done - which is a sad indictment on the state of affairs in IT.

My interest in this subject is that innovative solutions like Blue Prism are trying to address these issues, bringing agility to the business, but without damaging the integrity of the underlying systems, or creating the need for new code.

There will always be some place for swivel chair integration but let’s keep it to a minimum.  Once a process can be done manually, the only things that should prevent it from being automated are the need for human interaction, or the need for human intelligence (e.g. expert judgement).

Various thoughts on this are neatly covered by Lorraine Lawson at ITBusinessEdge.  Various metaphors are being suggested for SOA including the Lego one (but Lego bricks can only be used once!), the fast food metaphor (puh-lease!), the service contract model espoused by David Sprott.  Actually this last attempt is one of the better ones, but David still dives off into a dry cleaning analogy at one point, and talks in very technical non-business-friendly language.

I still maintain, however, that all these metaphors miss the point.  What business people are interested in is what SOA can do, not what it is.  So as a business head, I might have a desperate need for agility, the ability to react to external events, to capitalise on short term market opportunities.  I realise that my existing IT infrastructure constrains me.  If I ask my IT dept how I can be more agile, then SOA may be a solution, but to be frank, I am not that interested.  I am interested in the cost of course, and how long it takes to deliver.  I am interested in understanding the solution and how it will enable (or constrain) my business processes, but I am not interested in the technology or the architecture behind it.

I know IT people are not going to like my views here - but SOA is just a means of delivering what the business needs.  It is not the only means either.  It depends on what the business needs are.  By “selling” SOA, IT folk are being very presumptive about what the business needs.

I think that there are more similarities between IT and building architecture than most IT people are prepared to admit.  If I commission an architect to build me a house, I am interested in the shape, size, finishes - what the building does for me.  I am not interested in the whether the structure is steel or wood, I am interested in whether the house is still standing after a storm.  I am not interested in whether the foundations are dug with a spade or a mechanical digger.  I am interested in how long it takes and how much it costs.  So if I ask an IT architect to design me a solution, I am not interested in whether they use SOA or P2P architecture, I am interested in whether I get the flexibility I need from the solution.

It makes my blood boil when IT depts and vendors sell technology.  Some even suggest that ROI is not the point of SOA.  Any business investment has to stand up to the scrutiny of return on investment.  I feel really stupid even saying this but if SOA (or rather the business solution delivered using SOA) does not deliver return on investment then don’t do it - simple huh?

As a vendor, I know we are all guilty at times, but we really ought to focus more on business need and deliver against that.