The Model-Driven Enterprise

The role of technology in the enterprise is changing. Of course, that's not a new idea, but I thought I'd take a moment and discuss how it's changing and why it's important.

The problems with big business today (and, increasingly, businesses in the SMB space too... let's say, above $500 million) is that they are getting too complex to manage effectively. Stated differently, the hodge-podge nature of the underlying systems in a company directly impact the reporting and visibilty that management has of the company. You know the systems and complexity I am writing about: all those which have either been home-grown, bolted onto or added to through acquisition of companies or expansion of product lines... "leading edge" ERP systems based on 1980's technology concepts and 1950's management concepts.... software contemplated before you began outsourcing and offshoring.

I know of one company that just went through an implementation of a "leading ERP application" and they now have less visibility into their products and processes than they had before. And this implementation was just completed! What the company failed to realize is that it wasn't transactions they needed a better system for... it was the newly fragmented processes introduced by their new contract manufacturing model. And ERP vendors offer little in the way of simplifying complex processes that live inside and outside the firewall.

The new software must offer a new paradigm, and new tools, that mask this complexity without forcing you to replace it. The new software must offer the ability to abstract your company and its capabilities so that the visibility and management is independent of implementation. The new software must offer you the ability to define how you want the company to be managed and how you want the company to behave, and then there must be direct, visible reporting linkage to the tasks you want performed and the behaviors you expect.

In short, you need to model your business, and you need to be able to manipulate your business via those models.

This isn't a very business-y word, "model", but it's where we're headed. This abstraction, these models, must allow you to easily see recurring patterns, so that the same model can be used to describe different parts of your business... re-using these models, or processes, over and over.

These models must have built-in notions of visibility and help you to understand whether your business is, in fact, running based on your model, or if you are off course. The model of your company needs to reflect compliance and trading relationships and a host of other details that you just don't have visibility into today... much less the understanding of how you might easily change those things or how that change would impact your performance.

There's a lot yet to be invented here but the first step is understanding this: in order to achieve the economy, the compliance and the agility you must have to compete in the 21st century, you need to eliminate the complexity that today's information systems impose upon you. And this means you need to be dealing with a software representation of your company that is an abstraction of the current "physical" state. This abstraction, this model-based world, is what Enterprise Process Management is about.

This is not about a graphical tool that let's you build an application faster. And this is definitely not about a simple "modeling" tool that doesn't lead directly to execution and visibility. Simply drawing a picture is not a "model-driven business."

A model-driven business requires a new kind of platform, a platform that runs in concert with your existing underlying systems, and helps to mask the complexities of those systems. In fact, so much of the complexity is masked that real people in the lines of business of your company will directly manipulate these models, developing reports, doing what-if analyses, determining in real-time exactly what part of which process has the most impact on some dashboard metric that just went "red."

This is about changing how you manage your company for the better, reducing the complexities (and therefore costs) that have been inserted by doing business in a more complex way than you did business even ten years ago. It is about taking back your business, and using simpler tools with more powerful insight so that, once again, the business runs the business.

Technorati Tags: 21st Century Process, BPM