Category — Business Intelligence

“B” is our middle name. We have “B” scattered throughout everything that we do. At times we fight over who owns the “B” word. I’m in search of a unified “B” story and solution. IMO, if we had this, it’d be tough to compete with us in any of the “B” acronyms.

The “B” Business TLA’s: Business Service Management (BSM), Business Process Management (BPM), Business Performance Management (BPM), Business Activity Monitoring (BAM), Business Transaction Management (BTM), Business Intelligence (BI) and I’m sure there are others.

What’s it going to take to have a unified “B” story and solution? Sure, we’ve probably got mentions in individual roadmaps and presentations of how we’ll integrate with this, share data what that, use Cognos here or there, send events from one tool to the other, etc. but what about a real “B” solution? IMO, these approaches just prolong client value and significantly delay any real innovation in core products.

What’s the cost of “forking” and creating a new solution entirely? One that focuses on becoming best of class in all of the “B” areas (ok, at least do all of them pretty darn good)? One that can be implemented and managed by one team free from (well, probably not) the organizational politics that’d exist if it was a “solution by integration” solution. One that has the best possible chance of truly aligning business and IT. Ok, this is probably cost prohibitive, but its GOT TO BE THE END GOAL!

This is where the politics come in unfortunately…where would you start? Which “B” is the most important “B”? Is it Business Service Management - my preference is here of course. Our friends in other organizations would see it other ways for sure. We must find the right way to develop the “B” story and solutions in ways that are most beneficial to the client. We must include content in each others products that “treads” on each others turf. We must have joint releases that build towards the unified “B” story and solution. When we release a new business process management suite (BPMS) we must include dashboards, models and integrations that provide value OUT OF THE BOX inside our BSM product. This must be backed up with the business and services consultants who have consultative based skills to guide our clients through the process because this isn’t about the product as much as it is about working through the organizational problems and politics.

A unified “B” story and solution may sound like a pipe dream, but it’s what clients really want to strive towards and our competitors are making giant strides in this direction. What would your ideal “B” solution look like? If you were king for a day …

Is there such a product or capability in a product that could do enterprise wide scheduling and calendaring? What I’m interested in is not related to people, meeting, conference room scheduling, but more along the lines of enterprise planning, BI, etc. where one could input into such a solution that ‘between the hours of 12pm and 2pm’ are the most critical hours of the day for this business service, application, transaction. Or something that could be the repository for killer business impact information based on BI type data feeds, etc. Or something that bleeds into service catalog/IT cost & usage that could track costs/impacts/revenues for use of business and IT services during a certain period, from a certain location, etc.?

Not sure if this is an SLA type tool as SLA’s and OLA’s may not always necessarily be involved. Something more along the lines of an uber-business-intelligence knowledgebase that’s business service, application, process, transaction, flow, etc. aware.

Just curious…

Bekel’s posting some good content on balanced scorecards and business intelligence on his blog here:

http://scorecard.blog.com/