Wednesday, April 27, 2011

Another analyst report on Be Informed

By: Frank Buytendijk, chief marketing officer

Two weeks ago, Forrester published an analyst report on Be Informed. I have had a few questions already if there are other analyst reports as well. I think I have found the ultimate analyst report on Be Informed. Even more, it has been out for many years.

The analyst in question is Rene Descartes (1596-1650), a French philosopher, and father of what is now called "rationalism". He validated Be Informed's way of meta-modeling the business, although I must admit I am doubtful whether he was actually aware of this particular use of his philosophy.

Descartes tried to establish a fundamental set of principles of what is true. What cannot be doubted. Like any good philosopher, interested in what is true, he looked at phenomena and the world around him and asked if there were different explanations possible. Testingbe whether the existing explanations were correct. The safest way of asking these questions is to have no preconceptions at all, to doubt absolutely everything. The only way to establish truth is to reach a certain sound foundation, or in Be Informed terms an ontology, of which the rest can be derived.

Descartes eventually reached the conclusion that everything can be doubted, except doubt itself. You cannot doubt your doubt, because that would mean all would be certain, and that is what you are doubting. The thought of doubt itself already proves that doubt cannot be doubted. And because you cannot separate a person from his thoughts, therefore, cogito ergo sum: I think, therefore I exist. In fact, you have to exist. If you think you are dead, the fact you are thinking you are dead, proves that you are alive, as thought implies life. Trying to doubt your doubt is a metathought (thinking about thinking).

Still with me? Let's apply this thinking to Be Informed. Basically Descartes said that the only thing that cannot be doubted is the metalevel. The rational and pure thought. Everything real in the world can be doubted. Every process. Every system. Every way of working. What cannot be doubted is your description of your business model, or as Peter Drucker called it, your theory of the business. In fact, it is the only thing you can rely on. Your understanding of the world around you is changing all the time, because of new insights, but it is the only thing you in the end are in control of. The rest is questionable.

This exactly is Be Informed's approach. By building a business process ontology, you shape your world. Any specific process, any specific transaction, any instance of reality is simply derived from it. It is not needed to predefine every single process or exception, the only thing you do is describe the rules that every process instance (or in Be Informed's terminology: case) needs to obey.

Any more questions on the validity of Be Informed's ontological approach, in comparison with the common “best practice” approach of defining concrete processes? I doubt it...

Friday, April 22, 2011

Banging on your door

By: Rik Hoogenberg, chief executive officer

Currently, the need for efficient operations, transparency and building trust are to be considered universal for any administrative organization. Our experiences in the US, the UK and the Netherlands show that both public and private organizations are faced with the same tough challenges: improve performance and earn customer loyalty using resources as efficient as possible.

After years of business process optimization, drastic improvements can only be reached by adopting new principles for these processes. Modern organizations are increasingly abandoning traditional process oriented dogma’s in favour of a case based approach. The essence of this revolutionary idea is based on two key elements: business rules and customer context. These two elements are all you need to reach a decision, and that is precisely what the business process should deliver. The case based approached brings together business rules and customer context in any given situation, rendering yesterdays complicated process schemes obsolete. The catch here, is that anything can be considered and treated as a business rule; even exceptions. This notion is crucial for achieving breakthrough results in modernizing administrative organizations.

Dynamic case management, as analyst firm Forrester coined it, facilitates a tailor made process for any customer case through a generic, standardized path of dynamically assembled activities. And so far, the best of the story is that dynamic case management has a proven track record. The integration of business rules and customer context has proven to save organizations up to 50% in costs of operations and reductions in total cost of ownership which amount to 70%. And recently, Forrester even published a vendor snapshot report on Be Informed which, of course, makes me very proud. Don’t miss out on this one, once the word gets out to any stakeholder, they will be banging on your door.

Tuesday, April 5, 2011

IT is dead, long live IT!

By: Rik Hoogenberg, chief executive officer

Government organizations worldwide are struggling with ICT. They say it’s complex, so costs soar and the software is not doing what it should do. The point is precisely that many government IT organizations are not necessarily complex, but complicated. That's because they piled all these systems and applications on top of each other over the years. Legacy systems and licenses have become a hydra-headed monster that keeps itself alive.

At a time when government organizations worldwide have to cut costs, it is no longer justifiable to invest in legacy systems. In recent years, IT has developed impressively. Model Driven Architecture principles and 'Goal Oriented Business Process Management' offer opportunities to administrative organizations to be more responsive and agile for a fraction of the costs they are accustomed to.

Would it be risky to adopt a new approach to business processes? On the contrary! Dynamic case management, as analyst firm Forrester calls the new approach, allows organizations to improve customer intimacy and cut costs at the same time. Only semantic solutions like Be Informed can do that trick.