Harvesting Integration to Feed the World

wheat harvestIn the last decade, the world population has increased by more than 700 million to reach seven billion today. And by 2050, there will be two billion more people to feed. According to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), food insecurity is a major global concern today. With food consumption exceeding the amount grown for six of the past 11 years, countries have run down reserves by more than 30%.

Manage Risk to Increase Food Security

World grain reserves in the United States and other food-exporting countries have gone so low, that severe weather and extended calamities can cripple the food supply chain. Add to this tough scenario, the complexity, risk, and uncertainty inherent in agriculture and commodity supply chains. Managing and mitigating these risks – production, market, macro-economic, regulation – will play a significant role in determining the food security and safety for the billions of our population. [Read more...]

Don’t Have an Integration #Fail, Have an Integration #Success

Stop failing to plan with your integration initiatives and start to plan for integration success. Over the past weeks, we have run precautionary warnings about the risks of failing to integrate systems and common mistakes in bad implementation. Heed our warnings and be careful you do not become a statistic for companies that failed.

Welcome aboard Integration Success

We started this integration ride with companies that often forget to think about the enterprise in the enterprise service bus (ESB). Before getting back on the bus, we have to make sure that infrastructure capabilities are aligned to enterprise-level requirements and the company can put the E back in ESB.

Further down this ride, there were some companies that decided to lie in the path of the oncoming bus. Hiring programmers to write computer code might be a quick fix to a solution, but with different coders using different programming languages, it becomes impossible to attain a holistic picture of the company. Using a bus-based architecture will allow the company to manage connections with applications through one interface. [Read more...]

How Can You Have Any Apps If You Don’t Eat Your Data?

Getting the right apps into the hands of your customers quickly requires an infrastructure that can handle the load. Assembling the components is tricky because there’s a combination of new data and old to manage in the moment for the best customer experience. Telecom companies like T-Mobile need to be able to handle this exponential increase in data volume, and also analyze this new source of data to deliver the right services to each customer.

Anticipating the newest mobile app is like waiting for the next blockbuster movie; it’s become a major event. With top lists of most popular apps published per month and even per week, there is a whole market around interest in apps. Ruzzle, a word game resembling Scramble, earned the top position on iPhone apps charts as the most downloaded game in January, giving us the first big hit of 2013. Of course, the runaway success story of 2012 was Snapchat, a photo-messaging app, where users were sending about 50 million snaps a day. Think about the volume of data these two apps alone are producing. It’s staggering. [Read more...]

Integration #FAIL – Part 2: Lying in the Path of an Oncoming Bus

Point-to-point integration can be a quick fix for getting information from system to system. All it takes is a bit of code and voilà – connection complete!

But what happens when the programmer who wrote the script falls off the face of the planet? Inevitably, a change will be submitted by the business. Just how long will it take to find the keys that unlock the black box?

A single instance might be manageable but if you’re like most organizations, dozens of hard-coded, point-to-point interfaces run beneath the surface of application development projects.

And chances are, developers used different technologies over the years, making it difficult to know where issues lie, let alone what could be causing a problem.

It could take an army to overcome a situation like this on a larger scale, not to mention escalated cost. So the question becomes: how much of your business’ agility and resources are you willing to put at risk? [Read more...]

Integration #FAIL – Part 1: Forgetting the E in ESB

Integration is no longer a nice to have. It is an indispensable foundation critical to enabling greater efficiency, agility, and growth. Over the coming weeks, we’ll look at common pitfalls that hold back integration success.

#1 – Forgetting the E in ESB

How many times have we seen an initial success fail to get traction across the enterprise? It can be painful to watch all of that effort fail to translate into enterprise-wide benefits, or worse, create more work when the time comes to think bigger picture.

We know why it happens: Parts of the organization invest at different times and for different needs. Big efforts have big risks that take very high-level approvals that are hard to get. Sometimes we can’t see the forest for the trees and other times we take when we can get.

But there are ways to head off this challenge. I call it “Putting the ‘E’ back in ESB”. 

Putting the E back in ESB means aligning infrastructure capabilities, even in the early stages, to enterprise-level requirements. Architected in a systematic way, it should enable the organization to focus on new initiatives, dynamically respond to change, and flexibly support growth.

A few areas to consider… [Read more...]

Like the Wright Brothers, TIBCO Helps Scandinavian Airlines Innovate in Air Travel

 

Orville and Wilbur Wright are credited with developing and building the first successful airplane. While they were not the first to build and fly an experimental aircraft, in 1903 they were the first to innovate the revolutionary concept of fixed-wing flight. Based on this fundamental shift in essential airplane architecture, we now have airplanes that travel the globe faster and better than anyone could have ever imagined. Every airline has them to thank for their business success, and Scandinavian Airlines understands the importance of safe and comfortable travel. Scandinavian Airlines is the fourth-largest airline in Europe and transports over 23 million passengers to 92 destinations in 33 countries each year.

The airline industry might appreciate the Wright brothers for their innovations in flying, but many other processes are critical to commercial airlines including customers and passenger service. As in most industries, unseen internal processes often get taken for granted, yet are just as important. Scandinavian Airlines is known as a technology innovator within the industry. They began migrating to a service-oriented architecture (SOA) infrastructure in 2002 and now have approximately 60 to 70 services in use internally and externally. Just as every airline and pilot can be grateful for the Wright brothers, Scandinavian Airlines also appreciates the unseen help and support TIBCO provides to the company. TIBCO’s platform-neutral approach to SOA is helping the airline manage services across heterogeneous platforms – a critical success factor in their environment. [Read more...]

NFU Mutual Automates Paper Processes with TIBCO Solutions

Business process improvement initiatives can yield efficiencies that have a direct impact on the bottom line. For NFU Mutual, the decision to automate its paper-based claim processing workflow is already starting to bear fruit. Whereas before, supervisors would distribute the incoming paper claims manually, the steps behind NFU’s claims processing are now orchestrated by TIBCO BPM solutions, and incoming claims are being automatically allocated to its agents. The system is smart enough to know when to route the claims to other offices if a particular office is swamped by high volumes of claims triggered, say, by a local disaster.

Since implementation, NFU has seen improved efficiencies, including a reduction of some 4,000 paper files, which in turn has freed up office space. Meanwhile, supervisors are free to focus on high-value assignments rather than allocate claims to employees, and backlogs are minimized as claims are being routed to offices with lighter loads. NFU Mutual is using TIBCO ActiveMatrix BPM, TIBCO Nimbus and TIBCO Spotfire to optimize its claims-handling process.

For more, check out this feature article  in Computerweekly.com.

Closing the Big Data Loop

It has been two weeks since TUCON 2012, the TIBCO user conference held annually in Las Vegas, Nevada. TIBCO is well-known as an integration company but used the event to demonstrate its broad platform approach to the biggest challenges of today, like digital customer experience, loyalty, and the topic of this article, Big Data.

The TIBCO CTO, Matt Quinn spoke about the patterns hiding within the rapidly increasing amounts of data flowing across the enterprise. Quinn made an important distinction between data at rest, information sitting in databases or flat files waiting to be queried, and data in motion, which includes streaming data and data stored in-memory (also known as cache).

Quinn made the point that it takes analytics like those offered within TIBCO’s Spotfire product to be able to see what would be invisible to people trying to keep up with the increasing deluge of information. To Quinn, the smart enterprise finds patterns in historical and machine data (log files that up until recently weren’t mined for patterns) that provide insight that can be applied to data that’s coming at today’s “full speed.” [Read more...]

Operating a 21st-Century Enterprise

There are remarkable shifts going on in the world that are changing the way business is done. When we see disruption happening and it isn’t about an emerging market, it is about this very shift. Before we go into the ‘what’, let’s look at the ‘why.’

When we began to computerize, we did it to solve very specific problems, starting with accounting. Pretty soon, integration became the way to connect many problem-solving solutions, and it was quite messy and terribly point-to-point. This was the golden age of IT departments as any application functionality and any integration between systems flowed throw their hands. It launched the role of the CIO as the same level as the COO with all of the political ramifications that followed.

Big platforms like ERP and CRM came along as the way to ‘tie together’ all of those point solutions but, in the process, created the monolithic systems that everyone loves to hate. The single, big database became an important source for enterprise information. Speed mattered less than resilience and centralization.

That brings us to today. [Read more...]

How Increased Data Visibility Via Mobility Can Optimize Workforce Productivity

“Work is something people do rather than a place people go,” aptly describes the necessity of a mobile workforce in today’s business environment. You are not likely going to wait for your field executive to reach the office to analyze reports collected on-site. When you have the latest mobile devices and communication infrastructure that makes distance irrelevant, you want to work on those reports immediately and possibly make an immediate decision while your field executive is still on-site. Having the power of information in the palm of your hands gives you the edge in providing your customers what they need.

In companies with a mobile workforce, critical information is sent from field staff working with suppliers and customers to back-end office systems that are used to run the business. Capturing and making use of that field data in real time and integrating it with business-critical systems helps a company build stronger integrated business processes. [Read more...]