PracticalSOA

Newsflash: The leadership in organizations hates IT. (Link goes to CIO.com)

The writer of the article ascribes this hatred to “cost, complexity and customization”. The last one should read “lack of customization” but that makes the list asymmetrical and not as catchy

What surprises me is that while executives always rant about those three factors, very few complain about the lack of innovation coming from their IT organizations. I do not mean to imply that all IT organizations fail at innovation. But seriously, when was the last time you heard a CFO or a CEO get genuinely excited about an IT innovation that helped solve a major business problem?

Rightly or wrongly, the average IT department has transformed - some would argue it was always so - into an implementor of technology. It evaluates software, it implements them and it keeps the software running. Who has the time to innovate?

Should not that be making business executives mad? Unfortunately, unlike the 3Cs, it is not so simple to blame IT for not innovating.

Part of that blame clearly belongs to the company’s leadership.

It’s refreshing to read someone in the media asking businesses to stop worrying so much about Twitter and Facebook and focus instead on SAP and ERP apps. (Link to Thomas Wailgum’s column in cio.com)

It is obvious that people working in enterprise software are suffering from a serious case of “buzz envy”. Newspapers, blogs and magazines talk endlessly about the social networking revolution and how it will completely transform the world as we know it. Enterprise software, that relic from the mid-1990s, is not worthy of any attention at all.

If that’s not a case of utter lack of self-confidence, I don’t know what is. We are talking about software that keeps businesses running, right? The same software that helps Apple design, manufacture and ship its computer to some Twitter user who then posts a terse-but-witty 140-character message that lets everyone know he plans to sleep through the rest of his weekend?

I have no doubt that there are some interesting ideas in the social networking/Web 2.0 world that could make enterprise apps more useful. (Link to ZDnet).

But why not make enterprise software business simpler and more fun to use? Is it no longer a worthy goal to drive user productivity through better designed ERP and CRM apps?

Do you know what Derek Jeter’s batting average is? Against Red Sox? In the 9^th inning? When Yankees are trailing by 1? And the count is 1 ball 2 strikes?

Does anyone care? If you ask me today, in March, the answer is no. But wait till Yankees are trailing Red Sox by 1 and Derek Jeter is batting with runners on 2^nd and 3^rd in the 9^th inning of a game in September. At that instant I care.

Sports statistics/analytics are quite frankly meaningless unless you happen to be a very small group of die hard sports nut like me. But put those analytics in context and then suddenly you have a much wider audience who can benefit from the cool analytics and stats. ESPN’s Gamecast (live baseball scorecard) is a perfect example of a really powerful composite application – live scores with situational analytics/stats all in one place. Fantasy games is another great example of composite applications that widen the use of ESPN’s traditional assets – live scores with analytics/stats.

What does this mean to the business world? Just think of all the great BI analytics and reports that SAP customers have invested in. They have spent millions in gathering data and building intelligence over a period of time. The problem? How many users use this intelligence with the fancy pivot tables, drill downs and slice and dice views? Probably 2% who have the training and the knowledge of how to run those fancy reports.

For example you might have a great BI report that gives you the break down of sales by product category for the last 3 years. Yeah, its a cool report. But put that in the hands of the Sales person who is preparing for the visit to a prospect in the Hospitality industry, it is invaluable. Your sales person now suddenly knows what products/solutions to concentrate upon during the sales call. And yes, don’t ask the sales people to go figure out the SIC code of the customer from CRM system, and then run a BW query (if you remember the query name) with the SIC code as the input. They will not do it. I know I wouldn’t.

What you need is the ESPN Gamecast type composite application that delivers this Situational and actionable intelligence to the sales person when he/she is preparing for the sales call.

What makes this possible? Without breaking the bank? SOA and Composite applications – of course. More on that later.

A proud moment for all of us at Bridge-X:

SAP’s SDN carries an interview with one of our founders, Sandeep Nalgundwar. (Note: The link opens up an MP3 file).

The interview was conducted by one of the most respected writers covering the enterprise apps business today.

Even though our team has been working on these composite application ideas for more than 2 years now, it is good so exciting to hear a dedicated follower of technology like Paul Greenberg describe our composite applications as “amazing” in that interview.

Matt Asay, in his “Open Road” column on CNET:

“On Monday, Goldman Sachs released an update to its “IT Spending Survey” report, and now projects a 9 percent decline in global IT spending, and a 12 percent decline in developed economies.”

(You will have to click on the chart accompanying the article to look at the statistics.)

No surprises there - “cost reduction” is the #1 high priority for companies right now and Microsoft Vista upgrades is at the bottom of the list.”SaaS” is also near the bottom, which is surprising given all the (well-deserved) hoopla around it these days. (That directly contradicts the #1 priority. Won’t SaaS help companies reduce cost of IT ownership?)

But what about SOA and composite applications? The latter, in our experience, are not yet showing up on IT budgets even though companies are finding them very useful to solve real business problems.