Eduardo E. Elgueta
CEO - Business Development.
The Technology is the Business
11/12/09 16:58
From Wikipedia: The medium is the message is a phrase coined by Marshall McLuhan meaning that the form of a medium embeds itself in the message, creating a symbiotic relationship by which the medium influences how the message is perceived.
My version: The technology is the business, an Eduardo Elgueta’s pirated paraphrased expresion from Marshall McLuhan, meaning that technological architecture embeds itself in the business creating a symbiotic relationship by which technology influences business performance.
By “technology” I mean the technological architecture, the technological products and developments and how these are used within the organization.
It may sound as a powerful concept but it entails the risk of hanging about in the medium (technology) forgetting the message (business).
Too audacious?. What do you think?
By “technology” I mean the technological architecture, the technological products and developments and how these are used within the organization.
It may sound as a powerful concept but it entails the risk of hanging about in the medium (technology) forgetting the message (business).
Too audacious?. What do you think?
0 Comments
Everything is a Process
05/12/09 18:00
There has been an evident evolution of the paradigm to apply information technology to business environment. In broad terms, what started by using computing technology to calculations took promptly to spreadsheet structured programs, which in turn opened access to the world of applications and from there on to OOP (Object Oriented Programming), which rapidly scaled to Object Oriented Design and now lands on the realm of SOA (Service Oriented Architecture).
Along with this evolution, a parallel movement has emerged from business administration and management to give shape to Process Orientation or BPM (Business Process Management) and a whole new technological industry around this concept.
As it usually happens, confronting ideological positions have led to long discussions as to whether SOA or PBM is the most appropriate paradigm. Some have suitably posed that “BPM is from Venus, SOA is from Mars” (googling this will pull up many references), meaning that BPM advocates tend to be business managers, while SOA advocates tend to be IT managers.
Nevertheless, from my standpoint this dichotomy does not exist, mainly because it is clear that processes oriented to achieve expected results is what businesses is all about. That evolution from calculations, through applications, then functions, and finally services has followed technology improvement curve on its way to reach the ability to furnish an holistic view of the enterprise environment.
Many will debate that Service concept is good enough to build all the software artifacts needed to accomplish tasks within business environment, but that takes away all that happens outside the computers, which is usually the most important: decisions, creativity, control, policies, strategy, etc.
Is the Service concept useless? Not at all. It’s only not enough. As in these last decades we have fought to terminate information silos, we must take care of not to end up creating “service silos”. The only way to achieve this is to focus on the processes that the enterprise designs, implements and executes to accomplish its tactical and strategic objectives.
In fact, in order to change this paradigm we simply must change the Service definition to System Process, i.e. transaction intensive sequence of tasks carried out with no (or minimal) human intervention. In practical terms this is exactly the same as a Service, but it allows us to introduce the concept of Human Process (or Human Centric Process), i.e. the one that requires a person or team intensive collaboration.
Therefore, if we think that everything is a process, beyond Service, it will be easier to expand our architecture from technical realm to business realm with no change on our paradigm whatsoever.
That is why we at Navix do not talk anymore about SOA nor PBM but we do about POA (Process Oriented Architecture).
Do you agree? What is your viewpoint? I would like to read your comments on this.
Along with this evolution, a parallel movement has emerged from business administration and management to give shape to Process Orientation or BPM (Business Process Management) and a whole new technological industry around this concept.
As it usually happens, confronting ideological positions have led to long discussions as to whether SOA or PBM is the most appropriate paradigm. Some have suitably posed that “BPM is from Venus, SOA is from Mars” (googling this will pull up many references), meaning that BPM advocates tend to be business managers, while SOA advocates tend to be IT managers.
Nevertheless, from my standpoint this dichotomy does not exist, mainly because it is clear that processes oriented to achieve expected results is what businesses is all about. That evolution from calculations, through applications, then functions, and finally services has followed technology improvement curve on its way to reach the ability to furnish an holistic view of the enterprise environment.
Many will debate that Service concept is good enough to build all the software artifacts needed to accomplish tasks within business environment, but that takes away all that happens outside the computers, which is usually the most important: decisions, creativity, control, policies, strategy, etc.
Is the Service concept useless? Not at all. It’s only not enough. As in these last decades we have fought to terminate information silos, we must take care of not to end up creating “service silos”. The only way to achieve this is to focus on the processes that the enterprise designs, implements and executes to accomplish its tactical and strategic objectives.
Therefore, if we think that everything is a process, beyond Service, it will be easier to expand our architecture from technical realm to business realm with no change on our paradigm whatsoever.
That is why we at Navix do not talk anymore about SOA nor PBM but we do about POA (Process Oriented Architecture).
Do you agree? What is your viewpoint? I would like to read your comments on this.