Making Legacy Agile Controlled Migration

Controlled migration uses BPM solutions to "wrap" around ageing, inflexible, IT assets. The processes within these assets are exposed in a more flexible agile process layer. The processes can then be adapted to changing needs of the business without having to "rip and replace" core systems.

The problem with CRM, ERP and older mainframe applications is that they were not designed to be agile. CRM solutions are great data repositories but they support processes poorly, with users needing to navigate to the right screen to find the piece of information they need. Worse still, making changes to the original "data views" was a difficult, time consuming and costly exercise. 

ERP Solutions fared little better as they were designed with a "best practice" process already installed. If the client wanted to amend or adapt this process it became a difficult, costly and lengthy exercise. Mainframes fare no better and were never designed to cope with today's fast changing process centric environments. Many applications were product centric and dictated a rigid hierarchical menu driven approach to accessing data and functions.

Other proprietary workflow or off the shelf products  were never designed for integration and therefore became isolated islands of functionality and the only way to access them was to rekey information form one platform to the other, with the inevitable miss keying errors and delays in processing that result.

Modern enterprises are multi product customer centric organisations that require knowledge workers to execute multiple customer related tasks at the same time, with a backdrop of aging IT infrastructure, the challenges are huge.

By using a BPM solution like Pega Systems PRPC, the process is primary and the application is designed to present the right data to the right person, at the right time. The system guides the user through the process, as opposed to the user having to find the data or remember what to do next. Processes, products and even new applications can be added to an application in weeks or months rather than years.

Finally controlled migration is about protecting assets. The ability of BPM solutions to integrate more quickly with critical systems across the enterprise, to expose hidden processes and  to facilitate change and adoption. By exposing functionality in the process layer organisations are able to extend the useful life of their IT assets which remain as systems of record or transaction processing engines. Over time more processes and business rules can be transferred to the more agile and flexible process layer while the underlying system can be safely retired or replaced. This "controlled migration" can be implemented with impact to business as usual.

MDM and Business Process Management

The convergence of BPM and MDM is nothing new Products like Cordys have featured MDM components for some time while BPM vendors such as Software AG (when they acquired software foundation's) and Tibco also include MDM functionality as parts of their BPM stack. " business processes can only be as good as the data on which they are based" according to Forrester analysts Rob Karel and Clay Richardson in September 2009 they noted that data and process are as inseparable as the brain and the heart. Karel and Richardson went on to emphasise that;

…process improvement initiatives face a vicious cycle of deterioration and decline if master data issues are not addressed from the outset. And MDM initiatives face an uphill battle and certain extinction if they're not connected to cross-cutting business processes that feed and consume master data from different upstream and downstream activities.

Richardson also noted in his review of Software AG's acquisition of Data Foundations "The only way master data can reduce risks, improve operational efficiencies, reduce costs, increase revenue, or strategically differentiate an organization is by figuring out how to connect and synchronize that master data into the business processes…." Clay goes on to say …..With this acquisition, Software AG acknowledges that the customers of its integration and business-process-centric solutions have a strong dependency on high-quality data. This move reflects a trend that we have identified and coined as "process data management," which recognizes the clear need for business process management (BPM) and MDM strategies to be much more closely aligned for both to succeed …"

This observation is quite true, more recently two clients have posed the question of how to manage data across the enterprise when embarking upon a large scale BPM program. They have realised as Karel  did that "To Deliver Effective Process Data Management...  data and process governance efforts [will need]to be more aligned to deliver real business value from either."

The often discussed promise of adaptive processes or as Richardson remarked the ability to make "....processes much more dynamic as they're executing……. processes reacting to business events and able to adapt in flight." In order to make this happen clean accurate date is critical, other wise your processes are going to be adapting to unreliable or worse inaccurate data. The challenge according to Richardson is getting BPM and data teams to work together, research suggests that only 11% of master data management and business process management teams are co-located under the same organization or at least coordinate their activities.

Organisations like play core however have already begin to realise the benefits of aligning the two schools of thought. PlayCore is a leading playground equipment and backyard products company whose products are sold under the brand names GameTime, Play & Park Structures, Robertson Industries, Ultra Play, Everlast Climbing, and Swing-N-Slide.

Each of PlayCore's six business units has its own separate general ledger (GL) system, and PlayCore corporate has a seventh. Two of them use JD Edwards; three of them use Intuit QuickBooks, while the other two use Sage MAS 200 and MYOB.
PlayCore's challenges centered around:

• Consolidating overall performance results from the seven separate GL systems
• Manual, time-consuming effort to pull detailed information from the different GL systems into the BPM system
• Centralizing class, department, customer, product, account, and company master data.

MDM enables PlayCore to fully leverage their BPM system for efficient, timely analysis. It gives PlayCore the ability to produce quick, correct comparisons and reports on Class, Department, Customer, Product, Account, Company—without worrying about the underlying GL, but with all of the necessary ties to financial statements, enabling them to drill down where necessary.

 Source Profisee.com



 

BPM and mastering data across the enterprise

 BPM solutions typically rely on core systems to supply or even master the data that they supply. In the BPM process data is retrieved, displayed and updated from those core systems as part of a business process. 

Source Cordys Master Data Management Whitepaper

The BPM solution must rely on trusted data sources used by business stakeholders to support those processes, Master Data Management (MDM) is the process of aggregating data from multiple sources, transforming and merging data based on business rules.  According to Cordys (BPM and MDM supplier) an MDM solution must have the ability to:

•       Find trusted, authoritative information sources (master data stores)
•       Know the underlying location, structure, context, quality and use of data assets
•       Determine how to reconcile differences in meaning (semantic transformation)
•       Understand how to ensure the appropriate levels of quality of data elements

This functionality can and in my opinion should be provided by a solution dedicated to Master data management.  

BPM solutions provide the means to integrate processes across siloed business applications and departments.   This also means mediating or in some cases creating a data model and attribute definitions between multiple systems and departments. Typically data models in different systems do not share the same definitions or same validation rules as more and more systems come on line during a large transformation program managing the data model becomes more complex and an ever increasing overhead to business users.  

If not managed, maintained and updated the data model will no longer support current requirements and will be unable to grow to incorporate future systems as new processes come on line.  This can result in the need to re-engineer the data model and the BPM applications that rely on them.  Data migration of in flight work items is always difficult and time consuming causing increased disruption to the business and inevitable dips in customer service.

“The challenge for a BPM program is how to manage a consistent view of data across the enterprise applications that is now displayed through a single BPM solution”

Source Kalido Master Data Management Technical Overview

Data for a BPM solution is often mastered in one or more sources systems ERP, CRM, SCM or homegrown applications.   In some cases it may be the BPM solution itself and a separate data model is created for the BPM solution. The BPM solution typically retrieves displays and modifies data from source systems through the business process, the data must be updated in those source systems maintaining data integrity and data validation rules. 

Data definition, integrity and validation rules are often different for each system, a BPM solution grows across the enterprise encompassing ever more systems.  Manually attempting to manage a data model across multiple systems and components becomes physically challenging. 

The Capgemini MDM  solution comprises of tools that automate this process and provide model driven approaches to managing data including; automated sub-processes to perform data integration , data extraction, transformations, data quality routines to cleanse, standardize and parse data, find duplicates and manage potential matching candidates, validations and checks.
 “MDM provides a model driven architecture for creating and maintaining a model across multiple systems”

Source Kalido Master Data Management Technical Overview 

Data for a BPM solution is often mastered in one or more sources systems ERP, CRM, SCM or homegrown applications.   In some cases it may be the BPM solution itself and a separate data model is created for the BPM solution. The BPM solution typically retrieves displays and modifies data from source systems through the business process, the data must be updated in those source systems maintaining data integrity and data validation rules. 

The model driven approach enables the business user to define a semantic data model for the enterprise e.g. Customer , Product, Order, Payment, Service Request etc.  Data management tools can interrogate and align the semantic model across multiple sources maintaining relationships and data integrity

The semantic model is maintained in a separate environment that is dedicated to the management of data.  Although the business can author and update the model the complex data integrity and validation alignment across systems is managed automatically by the solution ensuring a much greater level of accuracy in data validation, with significantly less effort, ensuring faster time to market.