elemental links

@ Tibco TUCON: Real-time Retail, Using Information to Improve Customer Satisfaction

I’m at a CIO Innovations session.  Randy G. Burdick, EVP and CIO of OfficeMax, is going to present on real-time retail.  As a former retailer, who introduced real-time, event-driven architecture to the organization, I’m extremely interested to learn what OfficeMax has done.  According to the session abstract, OfficeMax’s “2-second advantage” story involves inventory levels, fulfillment processes, shipping, customer notification and customer loyalty.

OfficeMax is the combined entities of OfficeMax retail and Boise Cascade Office Supplies business.  Burdick opened with some background on OfficeMax and the challenges of the current retail environment.  These include declining sales & margins, changes in shopping habits (cross channel engagement, social media, Red Laser on the iPhone, etc) and green initiatives.

OfficeMax challenges in 2005, when Burdick joined the organization, included supply chain efficiencies, cross-channel customer behavior and interactions, lack of real-time information, compliance and risk management (PCI, fraud, confidential data), revenue growth and margin enhancement.  And of course, the spaghetti IT diagram slide.

IT Approach to these challenges:

- Educate and upgrade IT staff

- Establish and Mature an SOA Practice

- Establish business investment practices – strategic use of IT

The SOA slide, Tibco bus in the middle, ties core systems, customer systems, reporting etc.

Establishing the SOA Practice: Strategies for versioning, testing, monitoring, service design, security, deployment, performance tuning, capacity planning, backup and recovery.  Frameworks for testing, business metrics, error handling, deployment.  Processes: estimating, repository, service definition, etc.  People: training, offshore partnering and more…

Burdick said Tibco was ESB #2.  First attempt, prior to his tenure, was purely integration based.  [Resource vs. Business-driven] This was failure.

Architecture included business events and business process management.  EP examples: store sales, distributing item information.

Key: Prioritize by Business Value, not IT Value

Benefits: Accelerate development timeline, improved availability and performance, reduced costs, enabled business capabilities that in the past were cost prohibitive, real-time business metrics for any information flowing through Tibco, project teams now see value of bus, ask to use it.

Beyond the Basics

- Order out of stock items from POS

- Predictive monitoring of core business processes – order fulfillment

- Real-time analysis of business transactions – product affinity, hot sellers, proactive inventory response, price error check

- Cross Channel analysis

In closing, “Be Prepared – You get one chance”.

Audience Q&A

1. What Products?  Just the service bus.  [Not sure how that ties to BPM, then.  Definitely can do simple EDA with just a bus.]

2. What were the major changes to people and process?  Started in IT.  Established architecture.  Brought in outside people to form a core team.  Started with central team, throttled back demand, tested concepts, established frameworks. 

After 18 months, opened practice to other projects.  Had innovation and reuse rewards.  Lastly, frameworks on automated testing, repositories really allowed momentum gain.  Now, SOA has taken off organically.  Two to three year process to get people (IT) excited about SOA and value.

3. Business value?  Business responsiveness is the big driver, more so than cost savings.

@ Tibco’s TUCON: Customer Panel at Analyst Summit

This afternoon, we have an opportunity to interact with some of Tibco’s customers.  First, via a panel session and later in 1x1 sessions.  On the customer panel are representatives from the World Economic Forum, Colt Technology Services, Energy Australia and the Defense Intelligence Agency. 

Each organization represents a different use case, and product set, for Tibco.  The panelists were asked to give brief introductions, I captured the following:

World Economic Forum – Challenge: provide a forum for Davos constituents to collaborate throughout the year, at the physical events, and in day-to-day context.  Adopted tibbr as part of collaboration forum.  Use tibbr to identify information on collaboration platform that should be shared, and who it should be shared with, in a real-time and/or digest mode.  Right now, in the first step of a long journey.  There are 6,400 people on the collaboration platform.  The audience is the top echelon of business and world leaders.  Gearing up to use tibbr at the 2011 WEF.

Colt Technology Services – Use DataSynapse to provide cloud computing services to their customers.  Needed to create a platform for customers to use in an on-demand model.  Chose DataSynapse because they could combine platform, computing and data resources.  Their first service will be around Grid Extension.  Next, a managed grid environment.  Customers are pharma, digital production (rendering).  Essentially, building a cloud service delivery platform using the DataSynapse software. 

Colt did try using another product for resource management.  However, there was a concern (issue) for scale.  To use the first chosen product (un-named) they would have to rewrite many of their services.  This was not required with DataSynapse.  [hmm.]

Interesting point, “customers don’t want cloud”.  They want improved operational model.  But, they still want control.  To be able to “touch the implementation”.  And of course, comply with all regulations, especially around data and processing location.

Energy Australia – Tibco enterprise license.  10 year client of Tibco.  Speaking on two initiatives.  The first is SOA, evolved from an EDI implementation.  Have grown with the product set.  One of first organizations to implement BusinessWorks. 

New regulation required information exchange and SLAs.  Adopted BusinessEvents to manage SLAs, outage reporting and management.  Link information from control systems to management systems to scheduling systems.  Implemented an ESB.  The ESB allowed for ease of implementation of new services, such as customer facing web applications.

Now, undergoing $6 billion (yes, billion) infrastructure change for a Smart Grid.  This is a five year program.  From an IT perspective, scalability, mobile computing, scalability, and program management requirements.  Implemented ActiveMatrix.  Gains in provisioning time, ease of scale, virtualization.  Describe this as EESB, extended ESB.

Electrical network, biggest human control system in the world.  Introduces incredible risk for failure, and customer outages.  Smart Grid – with intelligent devices and instrumentation -- takes much of this risk out.  Plus, energy efficiency, higher customer service levels, etc.

The Smart Grid project is still underway. 

Q: Difference between ActiveMatrix and AppServer implementation?  Easy to manage multiple versions of the same service.  Don’t have to change the endpoints.  Another, is managing (translating) protocol impedance.

Defense Intelligence Agency – Use Spotfire.  Have applied Spotfire to 120 types of analysis.  Once “dump data into Spotfire”, have “2-second advantage” in that next answer is 2 seconds away.  Does give briefings from Spotfire.

Lots of good insights, but not many I can actually share.  Unless of course, I want to be deemed “an adversary”.  One I can share, picked over other tools, such as Business Objects, because “it’s so easy, an executive can use it”.

@ Tibco’s TUCON: SOA, Event Processing, Cloud Computing & more

For the start of this week, I’m at Tibco’s annual conference, TUCON.  I was invited by Tibco to attend the Analyst Summit and the main conference.  My primary interests here are no surprise: event processing, cloud computing and SOA.

One thing I’ve always liked about Tibco is they understand, and exploit, the connections between technology strategies.  Tibco has been linking SOA and Event-Driven Architecture for years.  And now, with Silver, they link SOA (services & composite applications) and event processing (sense and respond elasticity) in their cloud computing strategy. 

I’ll cover the conference via my blogs and Twitter.  I believe the twitter tag is #TUCON.  As disclosure rules allow, I’ll share interesting information from today’s analyst day.

 

[Disclosure: Tibco is not a client of Elemental Links.  However, they did provide travel and accommodations for TUCON.]

Announcing 2010 Case Study Contest: Business Agility and Process Optimization enabled by BPM & SOA

The BPM/SOA Community of Practice (CoP), in partnership with BPTrends and TechTarget, is sponsoring the “Business Agility and Process Optimization enabled by Business Process Management (BPM) and Service Oriented Architecture (SOA)” Case Study Competition. The competition is open to organizations of all sizes, including government agencies, which have successfully delivered business or mission value using a BPM, SOA or combined BPM-SOA approach.

Similar to the SOA Consortium’s contests in 2008 -  2009, the goal of the BPM/SOA Case Study Competition is to highlight business success stories and lessons learned to provide proof points and insights for other organizations considering or pursuing BPM, SOA or combined BPM-SOA adoption. To qualify for the competition, the project must be complete with demonstrated business results.

Entries will be judged on the complexity of the business problem addressed, the ROI/Business Value achieved (Agility/Innovation/Flexibility/Optimization/Resilience/Service Delivery), the level and sophistication of the cross-organizational collaboration (Business/Technical) and the usage of BPM/SOA approaches and supporting technology. In addition to one overall winner, organizations will be recognized by industry/government.

Case Study Competition winners will be announced at the BPM/SOA CoP meeting in Cambridge MA on September 21, 2010 and will be featured on the BPM/SOA CoP website and in October publications by BPTrends and TechTarget.

Visit the contest homepage to learn about the guidelines, peak at the application, and meet the judges.  Submissions will be accepted through June 29, 2010.

 

[Disclosure: The BPM/SOA Community of Practice is a client of my firm, Elemental Links.]

New Presentation: 6 Secrets of Successful SOA

As I mentioned earlier, I went to the ITLC Conference this week to speak on SOA.  The official session title was “Driving Transportation Efficiencies with SOA”.  The format was two 30 minute presentations, followed by a Q&A period.  My co-conspirator was none other than Maja Tibbling, Principal Enterprise Architect for Con-Way Transportation. 

As you may recall, Con-Way was a winner in the 2008 SOA Consortium Case Study Contest.  Con-Way has a great business transformation story, powered by SOA and Event Processing. 

After Maja delivered the SOA in Transportation presentation, I gave a new 30-minute talk on “6 Secrets to Successful SOA”.  The secrets  all pertain to standing up and managing a successful, sustainable program.  The discovery of these secrets was through my work with the SOA Consortium and Elemental Links (workshops, consulting).

I’ve posted the presentation to slideshare.  Take a look.  And yes, you can use the slides, with attribution to me.

6 Secrets of Successful SOA

View more presentations from Brenda Michelson.