In my role, I have the privilege of meeting with exceptionally bright customers to hear what they are doing. Most of these customers tell me that they are witnessing the effects of the nexus of 4 forces – Mobile, Social, Cloud and Big Data. A lot has been written about the nexus of the four forces – Mobile, Social, Big Data, and cloud. But, I think more importantly it’s not just that the forces exist, but what are these combined forces creating?

From what our customers are seeing, we believe these forces are creating proliferation of 3 key assets: Data, Services and Devices. It is this proliferation that is pushing integration to be the key focus for all new applications.

Data Proliferation

Big Data is everywhere and the newest and probably hottest area in the marketplace but integrating this big data is key to deriving business value. Data integration can be as “simple” as creating a single view of the customer – basically creating a single logical record of the customer data across the enterprise so that all interactions with the customer are consistent, and all relevant data is considered as part of that interaction. As one of our customers who is in the pediatric healthcare business put it, this single view isn’t a nice to have but it saves lives by ensuring all drug interactions are known and factored in from their pharmaceutical, surgical and ER systems. But, data integration can be much more complex, involving statistical pattern matching, algorithmic correlation and producing a model that predicts whether a particular transaction is safe or fraudulent. No matter what the application, if you are talking about data proliferation you probably need some form of integration to bring this all together.

Services Proliferation

My prior blog entry on “Big Services”  describes this area, but consider a relatively simple transaction of shipping a product from your favorite online retail site – there is probably dozens of services that need to be integrated together to provide a seamless experience – Customer data from one or more services, product data from another service, logistics data from the warehouse, preference list from a predictive analytics service, shipping time from the shipping service, credit verification from the card issuer, etc. This is a very simplistic view since products usually come from one or more partners, and the logistics and product availability is derived from warehouses across the globe. Net net, though, is that integration of these systems is key to ensuring that the customer has a great experience.

Device Proliferation

Much has been said about Bring your own Device (BYOD) and the need to have applications that address iOS, Android, Windows, web, and the multitude of screen sizes, but the real device proliferation is around the “Internet of Things”. Integration of the information these devices create is a key enablers to new applications. Consider another customer of ours who is in the recycling business. They integrate GPS data with telephony data, and create an application where customers can view where the recycling truck is and alert the customer when their recycling container has been picked up via a text message. Again, it is the integration that makes this application interesting and compelling.

What This Means for You

Integration is the application, and it is only through integration of existing assets that new compelling applications can be created that provide differentiated value. You need to have a plan and partner that takes the proliferation of data, devices and services into account and allows innovation through integration, only then will you truly have applications that take your business to the next level. Conversely. I challenge you to find the application that has no integration!

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Gartner’s Nexus of Forces

What we are seeing among our customer base is that breakthrough innovation happens when applications tap into the synergy created by at least two (not just one) of these computing models and are tied back into their core enterprise systems. For instance –

• Echo Entertainment, which is in the hospitality and gaming industry, combined the power of Big Data and Mobile to increase the quality of its loyalty program signups. It identified ‘high rollers’ playing in the casino to its floor staff in real time using a mobile app that combined live data from the gaming systems with large amounts of historical data in backend databases to perform in-flight analytics.
• Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) maintains vast datasets of highly distributed information around water, air, waste, and natural resources. It combined the power of Big Data and Cloud by creating and hosting a publicly accessible API that made the data accessible to not only its partner state agencies but also external developers.
• Nemours Children’s hospital a leader in pediatric care combined the power of Social and Information to create ‘smart’ patient rooms. A patient’s arrival triggers an event that enables the system to automatically provision the room with the child’s favorite video games and other electronic entertainment. When a caregiver walks into the patient’s room, another event is triggered enabling the system to retrieve their information from the hospital’s HR system and display it on the room’s TV for immediate identification.

The key point and underpinning of these innovative applications is an event enabled service-oriented architecture. It makes sense, if you think about it. To be truly useful, mobile apps require access to the backend systems via a layer of services. Big Data needs services to deliver relevant and timely business data in order to perform useful analytics. Social applications require combining enterprise events with enterprise data and activity streams where data is delivered by data services. And Cloud requires strong service-oriented governance infrastructure both as a provider as well as consumer of services. Monolithic, client-server, 3-tier architectures cannot provide the extensibility, scalability and agility needed for such innovation.

*Source: Gartner, Inc., The Nexus of Forces: Social, Mobile, Cloud and Information, Chris Howard, et al., June, 2012.

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Why couldn’t there be a “corporate instagram-like success”?

Why can’t a corporate enterprise service bus excite imagination the way Twitter has?

Often its the people way down in the trenches that have great ideas about improvements to the business. Other times, it’s just someone that has an itch to scratch. That’s why, give me five minutes in a non-busy store here in NYC and I’m behind the counter talking to the barrista/copy-guy/pharmacist about the systems they use to get their job done.

I believe there are ideas everywhere. And, if I were a CIO I’d make sure anyone in the company could innovate the same way they can in the consumer space.

Take the following example from my own career.

A long, long time ago, in an economy far, far away I was a pre-sales engineer at a network integrator. We were about 15 people; I supported 3 or 4 sales people. We I did the bill of materials for our proposals in Excel. All layout, pricing, and deal profitability analysis was done in Excel at the same time. To make my job easier, and to dramatically improve my throughput and accuracy, I customized the heck out of Excel. And, I did it in a way that made it easy for others to help me – like printing the right formats (for the customer, for management), examining deal-profitability metrics, and even some error correction to catch missing components. This is what young, energetic people who are full of ideas do. And, if we don’t enable them to do it at work, they’ll do it on the side and start their own business.

Fast-forward 20 years, and here we are. Instead of visual basic we have API‘s to let you do anything and online programming classes for marketing to teach you how. In fact, there are even small companies (here and here) who require all employees to learn to code.

Let’s take a closer look at API trends that could help enterprises unlock the energy of its employees to dramatically improve innovation.

Segmenting the API Market

When it comes to API’s and API management, there are two personas to think about, and three use cases to address.

The 2 personas are:

1. People who provide API’s (providers)
2. People who consume API’s (consumers)

The 3 use cases are:

1. Internal API usage
2. B2B API usage
3. External API usage

Segmenting in this way helps IT focus on how they speak to the different values and opportunities that each combination presents. It’s helps us to understand how API trends apply to us, and how to stay focused on adding value to the needs of enterprise IT.

In the context of *providing* API’s to an *internal* audience, here are 3 key behaviors IT can copy from the consumer market in order to capture innovation.

#1 API Management

One way to understand the trend around API’s is to take the perspective that API’s are the new website. If this is the case, why would it be any different inside the organization than it is outside? Today companies give employees pages full of information, tomorrow it will be API’s to data, events, and processes. Doing so presents challenges. Challenges to compliance. Challenges to support. Challenges around governance.

API Management provides a solution to these challenges and more. It provides a way to integrate IT more positively with the youngest generation in the workplace. A generation that has grown up digitally, and by its very nature has different needs from IT than generations prior.

#2 Code Academies

If you’re giving your employees API’s to important and useful corporate information via API, why not teach them to use it properly? And, if you think it’s just IT that’s learning to code, you’re wrong. The millennial generation is a familiar with technology as you are with a typewriter. They want a reason to learn to code, give them one or they’ll find their own reasons (and start their own companies on the side).

There’s a lot of energy in the business of teaching people to code. You may think they won’t be any good, that marketing people don’t have the skills or experience to write good apps. You’d be correct. But, I’d point out all the crappy websites that exist, and share my belief that quality will get better over time, and won’t be something that stops people from trying (or believing they have the right to contribute in this way). Bring these technologies in-house, train your own employees, and then set them loose…

#3 Hackathons & Coding Challenges

The third leg of the API trifecta are group coding efforts. Hackathons and coding challenges are used by the startup community and government to get people to contribute ideas in a constructive and collaborative fashion.

If you’re a large organization, why not have some internal programs to capture ideas and turn them into something the business can use? You’d be taking the people with ideas, and giving them a forum to use the API’s you’ve created and the learning-to-program training they’ve completed. You’d be pointing them at real business problems and seeing the solutions they create. Winners in the consumer space might win an award or a gift card. Or, they might enjoy the recognition that comes from having your app promoted on the NYC Subway or Apple App Store.

Why can’t an internal winner win executive sponsorship for their idea, to see if really can have an impact to the business? Isn’t this a great way to both bubble up ideas from the bottom, involve the generation who feels they have the right to participate, and develop your next generation of business leaders all the at same time?

The Trifecta

There you go, the Enterprise API Trifecta: 3 elements IT can incorporate from the consumer space today in order to create a more innovative and collaborative IT environment.

For additional insight into how IT can create a platform for internal innovation using a SOA infrastructure (including customer stories) why not watch this webinar on SOA Innovation that I recorded in November 2012.

The Enterprise API Trifecta is an excerpt from a thought piece I’m working on tentatively titled: The Consumerization of Integration: 10 Best Practices Enterprise IT Should Steal from the Consumer Space to Capture Innovation & Build a Mobile Strategy. Drop me a line if you’d like to hear more.

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The ProcessWorld mobile app was a big hit used by 578 attendees. The app was used 12,959 times to choose songs for the general session, download collateral, provide feedback and much more. The LinkedIn group had 352 members, and the Twitter #PW12 hashtag had about 150,000 impressions. Our customers appreciated a new and different way to network and engage with their peers.

The new “Meet the experts” program generated 119 one-on-one meetings with attendees and Software product experts. There were also 61 “executive exchange” meetings scheduled between attendees and Software AG board members.

Attendees were enthused about ways the new 9.0 releases address the cloud – a big topic of interest among nearly all attendees.

CTO, Dr. Wolfram Jost unveils the BIG news about ARIS and webMethods 9.0 in his General Session keynote. Attendees are ready, eager and waiting for cloud, social, big data and mobile in our new releases.

John Rymer, Forrester; Ivo Totev, CMO; Robin Gilthorpe, CEO Terracotta; and Cheryl Hawkins host a press roundtable on the ARIS and webMethods 9.0 release. The journalists represented CIO Magazine, Information Week, ComputerWorld Hungary, IT in Canada and many publications.

Accordingly to the on-site ProcessWorld survey 90% of attendees would recommend ProcessWorld to others and 85% plan to return again. The two biggest reasons customers attend are to learn new approaches to solutions (75%) and see successful project examples (67%).

The new “Quotation Station” video testimonial booth enticed 36 customers to record video comments about Software AG and our products. The video booth was a fun attraction throughout the day and customers were excited to share their stories on camera. Watch some of the videos on youtube.

And the fun and learning didn’t stop there. Check out more photos on our Software AG Facebook page. We look forward to seeing you again next year.

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Driving innovation at enterprises has always been a tremendous challenge.  There’s always hard to extend legacy systems, disparate systems to be integrated and monolithic applications to be changed. Doing so is painstaking and time consuming work, but the business side of the house is nevertheless focused on seeing immediate return on investments. Exacerbating this situation is the fact that there’s one too many ‘best practices’ to go around making it confusing as to what approach is expected to work for you and your organization.

But is there any getting away from this situation?

The stark reality is that in an uncertain global economy, constant innovation is central for businesses that want to survive and stay competitive. Add to the mix the game changing innovation in personal technology that we have witnessed in the last couple of years. There’s an app for virtually everything, smartphones and tablets are ubiquitous and we are increasingly consuming services in the cloud that has transformed entire industries.

Businesses today are looking at exposing internal capabilities and data via APIs as a new distribution channel for their products and services. They want to adopt the latest capabilities quickly with cloud-based solutions for marketing, sales and human resources that are seamlessly integrated with core enterprise systems. And they want new mobile apps supported on both official and personal devices to empower employees and reach their customers.

What does this mean to you, as an IT leader who is responsible for driving innovation?

It’s time for a comprehensive application strategy that can meet today’s demands for innovation and is well positioned to meet ongoing demands in the future. That means your entire application landscape should be built on a foundation that exposes the needed business capabilities to build new applications and allows rapid changes in the future. Taking a service-oriented approach (SOA) to your application architecture is the foundation for a sustainable innovative future. Customers in various industries have taken this approach with great success, here are just a few examples.

• Avnet is one of the world’s largest distributors of electronic components with over $25B in annual revenue and 100,000 customers. Over 70 acquisitions in 20 years that required integrating disparate applications running on multiple platforms created the urgency for IT to innovate. By adopting SOA along with end-to-end governance, they increased reuse going from 800 services to 111 interfaces, invoked 6M times a month! Avnet not only reduced development time by 55% but also significantly accelerated integration of new acquisitions.
• Endo Pharmaceuticals creates high-value branded products that meet the unmet needs of patients along care pathways for pain, urology, oncology and endocrinology. Their challenge was to integrate a cloud-based HR solution – Workday and synchronize data for 1500 employees to no less than 18 downstream systems. The company used an SOA infrastructure to integrate with Workday API using Pub Sub model for consistent distribution of data. They also established a governance framework to track data from system to system and guarantee security of personal information – critical for compliance reasons and key to success of the entire project. In the process, Endo reduced the time to complete the business process by 70% while increasing accuracy and lowering costs.
• BOK Financial Corporation  is a $27 billion regional financial services company based in Tulsa, Oklahoma. BOKF, NA has full-service banks located in eight states while BOSC, Inc., the broker/dealer subsidiary, provides brokerage services in 10 states. They started on their SOA journey in 2007 establishing an SOA governance committee along the way. In 2010, when they were asked to build a mobile solution with a full set of customer features and a high degree of quality, and speed. They completed the entire project in just four months crediting their architectural design for allowing quick development.

What was common in the approach among these very different companies?

These companies indeed had the right building blocks to establish an SOA and accelerate innovation. These building blocks are software tools to build an SOA infrastructure such that they 

• Are easy to adapt and build upon based on open standards to readily integrate with your existing systems and offer easy customization to suit your specific needs.
• Integrate tightly to eliminate duplicate work, keeping various development and deployment artifacts in sync, increasing automation which helps speed up time-to-value.
• Enable strong governance for service visibility, monitoring and metrics, and for ensuring security and other quality-of-service (QoS) requirements.
• Come with world-class expertise that provides methodology and advice customized for your organization and objectives to ensure successful implementation.

These innovative companies are hardly isolated examples. With the right building blocks,  you and your organization can also un-suck excel at innovation!  Just get the right building blocks! Check out this interesting Infographic on this topic.

The post Innovation Sucks Unless… You Have the Right Building Blocks appeared first on Reality Check.

“We started these Innovation Awards 5 years ago to showcase what our customer are doing with Software AG products. It’s really about the way our customers are using the tools, bending the way others have used the tools in the past and being innovative and creative. We recognize there are many great areas for value add.”—Ivo Totev, Software AG, Chief Marketing Officer

Each Innovation Award winner receives; free admittance and hotel accommodations at ProcessWorld, a $2,500 donation to the charity of choice and the chance to tell their story live on stage at ProcessWorld. (among a few other valuable perks) Watch the videos on our Innovation Award winners featured at ProcessWorld 2012, panel 1 and panel 2 discussions.

Please help us congratulate our 2012 Innovation Award winners for their great achievements.

• Process Excellence: US Foods- Learn how BPM put US Foods closer to its goal of becoming the industry’s easiest company to do business with. Learn more.
• Innovation: Echo Entertainment Ltd- Learn how the largest casino operators in Australia, turned to webMethods to automate its chip purchase voucher process. Learn more.
• IT-Business Alignment: Royal DSM- Learn how the global science-based company active in health, nutrition and materials, considers BPM critical to support its global business process transformation. Learn more.
• Consumer Service: Fujitsu- Learn how the leading European IT infrastructure provider, adapts faster to customer needs after expanding its investment in Software AG’s webMethods technology. Learn more.
• Return on Investment: travel-BA.Sys GmbH & Co. KG- Learn how the company’s innovation builds on investments in legacy systems and integrates external data seamlessly from SAP®. Reports are created without IT support through a self-service portal. Learn more.
• Productivity: Coca-Cola Refreshments- Learn how BPM is used to automate an equipment repair process and can track the movement and history of reach refrigeration unit to avoid ‘lost’ inventory, identify trends and uncover recurring issues. Learn more.
• IT Transformation: AvNet- Learn how the company advocates a Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) as a way to save hundreds of thousands of dollars and assure a highly available, agile infrastructure. Learn more.

Now it’s time for you to use these stories, to give your organization the reality check it needs to become an Innovation Award winner too. This could be you, so take note of the stories and stay tuned for more details on how and when you can share your innovative story with us.

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