Changing the Face of Software

Gartner SOA summit – pragmatism and innovation

2009-07-01T07:21:00.005+01:00

I spent a great couple of days last week at the Gartner SOA and Application Development and Integration Summit in London, emerging encouraged by the combination of pragmatism and innovation that I heard discussed.

Inevitably, much discussion centred on the economy and its implications. While technology –as Massimo Pezzini pointed out - might be seen as having helped the problem happen by “providing the infrastructure to enable the financial services sector to get into trouble faster than anyone expected”, I didn’t hear much discussion about what could (or should) be done to prevent that happening again! On the other hand there was lots of debate on how IT can help companies survive and reinvent themselves for the future. The (not surprising) prescription was to focus on strict cost control and alignment of IT projects with clear business cases, while keeping sufficient investment to foster innovation in key areas. In the short term for example, organizations need to use their resources to rapidly adapt sales and marketing patterns in response to changed customer behaviours. Longer term, much discussion centred on anticipated structural changes to industries (especially financial services) requiring better support for complex inter-company relationships and networks.

SOA adoption
The message I took on SOA – from both Paolo Malinverno’s opening keynote and much that followed - is that it has clearly taken root, especially in Europe and N. America. However there also seems no doubt that the recession is having a Darwinian effect, culling the projects without well-defined short term business benefits. Long term strategic business cases for SOA programmes are “out”, pragmatism in the form of prioritizing rapid payback from fixing business problems is “in”. As a result, lots of initiatives that have started bottom up with no focus on business problems (service enablement rather than SOA) risk being cut – one figure floated (and hotly disputed) was that this could kill up to 80% of the projects started thus far!

Enterprise mashups?
Given this background, where are enterprise mashups? Well there was certainly plenty of interest, with David Gootzit from Gartner talking about their having a key role to play as the “face of SOA” and becoming an important way to build composite applications. However, listening to talks and speaking with attendees confirmed to me that while a lot of vendors and users have focused on using enterprise mahups to build simple “dashboard” type single page applications, there is a huge need and interest in using them to address the new integration agenda of business focused pragmatism and innovation. The idea of using the mashup approach to rapidly build process based applications for different user groups and tasks, leveraging a wide range of enterprise IT assets is – to judge from the response we had – just the capability that many organizations need. It seems that there are many cases where business process improvements and flexibility are needed but custom application development is seen as too slow, expensive and hard to maintain, and full blown WS-* and BPM are not appropriate.

Conclusion? SOA isn’t dead, just growing up in a rather more austere environment than the one it was borne into. And enterprise mashups can make a massive contribution, so long as they focus on really changing the economics of building and using business applications.

What’s the call centre industry telling us?

2009-06-23T09:28:00.002+01:00

Given that Corizon works with many customer service organizations to streamline and simplify the use of applications for agents and customers, we take a keen interest in what the industry is saying and how it is responding to the economic environment. One organization that collects and analyses this kind of information in the UK is the Customer Contact Association, and I thought some of the findings they presented at a briefing this week worth sharing more broadly, along with relevant insights from our own work with customers.

Impact of the recession

When asked about changes being made in response to the recession, the results from organizations are interesting. It seems that they are not rushing to outsource calls and contacts, but are more likely now to outsource back office processes. However, by far the biggest shift is in consolidation, accelerating moved from multiple smaller sites to fewer, large and more economic centres. Based on our experience, the former is perhaps an encouraging sign for the contact centre, evidence of recognition that they are not just cost centres, but can be the key to keeping customers happy and buying more – both essential success factors in the current climate. The latter clearly makes economic sense, but gaining even greater economies of scale will require an increase in mutliskilling, something that has been a problem in many of the call centres we visit due to the learning associated with different roles and the IT systems they require.

Role of technology

The demand for technology solutions seems to be running strong. 58% of those surveyed by CCA felt that performance was being hampered by out of date legacy systems, while 47% felt that new technology would be a better investment for improving performance than training and upskilling their teams; 57% said that they would invest in unified desktop solutions.

However, there is also a sting in the tail for technology vendors, with about half the respondents feeling they repeatedly had to fight off attempts to sell them unnecessary technology, and a significant number demanding that new applications are created with more user input than happens at the moment. While the first point probably needs no comment, the latter point resonates strongly with our experience. It seems obvious that adoption, productivity and process improvements all strongly correlate with making sure applications are actually fit for purpose and built around the users, but the evidence suggests it is too often forgotten.

It was also intriguing (not to mention counter to many stereotypes) to hear that the CCA found that women managers are more interested in adopting new technologies, and develop better relationships with technology vendors than their male counterparts.

Moving to multiple channels

Perhaps not surprisingly, the need to embrace and move to new channels is prominent in CCA’s research. 88% of respondents saw increasing self-service on the web as a key enabler of cost reduction in response to the downturn. In principle, this frees agents for more complex, “value added” tasks, but the reality at the moment seems to be that the volume of inbound calls is not reducing. Why this should be is not clear, but there is increased awareness that integration across channels is essential if the result is not to be increased, rather than reduced frustration.

Finally, although there is obviously awareness that social networking and social media represent an important shift in the environment and are impacting service providers, it seems that the full implications are still being digested before conclusions are drawn.

Interesting times

Conclusion? It seems that if anything the recession is crystallising the debate on the role and value of the contact centre, self-service and the technologies that underpin them, and is driving change in interesting directions.

Are mashups lipstick on a pig?

2009-06-11T11:31:00.007+01:00

One of the debates currently going on is regarding the lifespan and role of mashups (cpettey/Gartner). Are mashups just tactical, throw away applications for short lived micro-requirements that come and go in the business (aka situational requirements) with the associated business case challenges? Are they just good to temporarily paper over a gap while your systems catch up with user requirements? In other words, are enterprise mashups short lived either for the simplest of “applications” or simply as lipstick on a pig as suggested to me recently by the CIO of a very large telco?

One of the great values of enterprise mashups is that they can deliver in very quick time frames by leveraging exiting systems and applications to streamline processes for people. This can be to address a “situational requirement” such as a dashboard, combining RSS feeds for data reporting etc. They can also help mop up legacy applications before retirement i.e. provide lipstick on your old architecture while you deliver the new one. They can prepare for the deployment of packaged application such as CRM or ERP. This provides the value of quickly testing in real time, with real users the required “user process” (i.e. the set of steps a user need to go through to complete a task). This can even be implemented in the look and feel of the enterprise application. Users will then not be disrupted by the deployment of the enterprise app while deployment will be speeded up by “learning” from the tested user process implemented in the mashup. Once the enterprise application catches up, then the mashup can evolve to do less, be retired itself or remain to provide the flexible, process driven UI that would continuously require updating. This will depend on architectural decision.

It is in the flexible delivery of process driven UI that enterprise mashup become a key part of modern architectures and are destined to power solutions that will remain in use for a long time. Why? Because modern architectures need lipstick as much as the old ones! With WOA, SOA or any component based approach, user-centric applications are still required when a business process need surfacing to a user and those end up being built bespoke for each user group. This is because user interfaces are not service enabled, not turned into re-usable components. This is where enterprise mashups play a key part: with the creation of visual, mashable components that can easily and quickly be mashed up into user centric solutions, they provide a “face” to web services and deliver the flexibility and process adaptation required at the user level to deliver flexible architectures from top to bottom.

The answer to the lifespan and role is that enterprise mashups provide real value when they address real process pain point, have a role to play in legacy and modern architectures and can endure for considerable periods of time while the content and function continually evolve.

What do you think? Do you see the same trends?

Enterprise Mashups and Cloud Applications

2009-06-04T16:31:00.003+01:00

Corizon’s recent launch of mashup extension packs for Siebel and eBusiness suite has prompted a number of conversations with journalists on the extent to which this value proposition transferred to enterprises adopting SAAS applications. I was surprised by the initial perception that enterprise mashups were required because of the difficulty of deploying applications on premise. Conversely there seem to be preconceptions that the need would be much less with on demand applications.

Enterprise mashup adoption is driven by the need to transform the economics of integrating applications to make people more efficient. The deployment of new applications, whether they are on-premise or in the cloud,increases the requirements for integration. The more new SAAS business applications are adopted, the more such integration will be required. This is exactly the experience reported by GE CIO Gary Reiner: implementation costs for applications:

“...they're largely around interfacing with existing systems, process changes and data cleansing, those three costs exist regardless of whether GE hosts that application or whether the supplier hosts that application.”

As a matter of fact, cloud computing is even more adapted to enterprise mashups. The key reason for this is that they promote the concept of keeping each functional application as vanilla as possible to reduce costs. Why re-invent a CRM package and not just adopt best industry practice? Differentiation is not gained by modifying each application but by integrating them to streamline your desired processes. For example superior end to end customer experience delivery is more likely to be achieved by seamlessly integrating the different applications required to support a particular customer journey (trouble ticketing, service diagnostics etc.) rather than customizing each application. This is where enterprise mashups play a critical role: by providing a quick and non intrusive way to create mashable components from existing applications and easily combining them to mashup a fit for purpose solutions that guide users to complete a task, they are perfectly suited to integrate your cloud with your on premise applications.

We are big proponent of service based applications at Corizon – this is where the company started! We also happen to believe they will be one of the key drivers to accelerate adoption of enterprise mashups. As enterprises adopt SAAS, they will be looking for new approaches to quickly, flexibly and cost effectively integrate their new cloud applications to allow people to do their jobs better. In the same way that enterprise mashups transform the economics of owning on premise enterprise applications, they will transform the economics of integrating cloud applications.

Funnel shaped mashups

2009-05-31T08:14:00.003+01:00

An interesting conversation on freedom vs control at the desktop in call centres, in conjunction with much recent speculation as to the "shape" of the economic downturn and recovery, made me wonder what “shape” a mashup solution needs to be, and what that would tell us about its design and delivery.

In a situation like a call centre you give the agent a job to do because you want him or her to do two types of things within a call which can appear quite inconsistent. First there is the need to analyse a situation based on “conversational” interactions with the customer and the systems on the desktop. This involves relatively unstructured interactions with the applications and customer, drilling into different information sources and exploring options with the customer. However, as quickly as possibly, a path needs to be chosen. The agent then must switch mode and move into a much more structured, regular approach to ensure no mistakes are made, all details are captured, and frequently that regulatory compliance requirements are met.

So it seems to me that for these types of activities, mashups are funnel shaped! The cone represents the user working in an unstructured, conversational way before moving into the spout and being constrained and guided through a defined process. So, if enterprise mashups are to support this type of interaction, then they need to support both modes of working in a single solution, and to get through the spout as quickly and efficiently as possible.

Taking the analogy further, not all funnels need to be the same shape. In fact many factors can determine the shape of funnel needed. For example

experienced agents need to be able to work in a less constrained way compared to rookies, and will find constraints demotivating and frustrating
new products are often trialled and launched with very broad cones while the organization learns using highly skilled agents. As the products mature and the agent base grows, processes then need to become more constrained and more “spout heavy”.
knowledge management solutions can be used to narrow the cone sooner by reducing the up-front analysis work for service desktops
sophisticated propensity-to-buy and segmentation based intelligence can help to move to the spout quicker and optimize outcomes

One thing is clear though, whatever funnel shape you start with, being able to change it and experiment is essential. The shape of the funnel is a key “lever” for call centre managers as they struggle to find the optimum balance between allowing initiative and empowerment and enforcing process repeatability. That’s where the flexibility and control provided by enterprise mashups are invaluable.

Integration without customization for Oracle E-Business Suite

2009-05-15T20:08:00.006+01:00

I repeatedly hear from our customers about the challenges they face in creating integrated user experiences around their investments in CRM and ERP applications. They find themselves constrained by long release cycles, full workstacks and the expense and scarcity of skilled resources. As a result, users have to carry on “swiveling” between applications on the desktop – bad news for the reputation of the applications and for efficiency, accuracy and costs.

Fixing this problem is a great use case for enterprise mashups, replacing complex customization projects with the much more lightweight and portable mashup process. We call it “integration without customization”. A while ago we announced a toolkit to be able to easily embed our mashups in the user workflow of Siebel applications; this week we have followed this up with our “extension pack” for Oracle E-Business Suite. The pack overcomes the challenge of embedding web UI in the EBS forms UI. By providing everything an EBS developer would need to be able to get a mashup deployed and launched within the EBS application, it cuts a task that could take many days into hours. As a result EBS owners can extend and integrate user desktops with minimal cost and effort.

We believe integration without customisation is a killer “mashup pattern”, especially in a economy where the focus is on getting more from existing investments like major enterprise applications. Through the rest of 2009 we will be working with our customers and partners to understand where else pre-built capabilities of this sort can smooth the process, so let us know where you see the clearest need.

Contact centres are ripe for enterprise mashups

2009-05-05T14:25:00.005+01:00

Spending time recently in a contact centre reminded me of a quip I heard from Lord Saatchi. He was talking to a senior director of a well know consumer brand and saying: “do you know the old saying about half of your marketing budget does not deliver but the issue is which half? Well for your company, I have worked it out: neither!”

So which half of your IT budget works in the call centre? Neither. You just have to look at how many applications call centre agents have to deal with during a call! Research shows on average 6 but in our experience the number is usually much higher. This is despite years of investment in technology in call centres. The reason for the failure? Each time a new requirement for the agent emerged, a new application would be built or an existing one would be modified. This lead to a proliferation of applications on the desktop, making the job of maintaining them (and integrating them) harder and harder for IT. No wonder release cycle of enterprise applications on the desktop can now be measure in months or years! This results in inefficient processes with dramatic economic consequences: high cost to serve customers while delivering, in a majority of cases, a poor customer experience. No wonder so many companies decided to give up on call centres and outsourced them despite the fact they are one of the most important (and inescapable) windows to customers.

This is why call centre is such a ripe environment for the deployment of enterprise mashups. By changing the economics of building and maintaining integrated solutions to call centre agents, they address the application proliferation issue, reduce dramatically the cost to serve customers by making agents more efficient and deliver clearly measurable ROI in short time frames. This is where we think the real value of enterprise mashup can be realized: in delivering real composite applications to address immediate business needs but in a way that is repeatable and complements modern architectures. A theme I will come back to regularly in this blog.

Mashups for productive conversations

2009-04-08T10:20:00.001+01:00

To allow users to become as efficient as possible, enterprise mashups need to blend naturally into their work patterns. It defeats the purpose if it takes multiple mouse clicks to find and launch a mashup and then copy and paste data into it when it’s needed!

The contact centre is a great example. Calls from customers arrive at agent desks via the CTI systems that handle routing and agent management. Mashups simplify the steps the agents need to go through to service the call – bringing together customer data, marshalling the screens the agents need. What’s needed to complete the picture is a bridge between the two, bringing CTI functions into the mashup.

In that light, it’s great news that Corizon customers now have access to a thin-client CTI solution that delivers a re-usable, easy-to-integrate, web-based UI that is designed (and certified) to form a building block of an enterprise mashup. Available from Corizon partner and call centre specialist Sabio, the solution has just attained Avaya DevConnect status.

This news is doubly significant. First it’s going to be even easier for organizations relying on CTI to make call centre conversations more productive with mashups. Second it shows how easy it is for partners such as Sabio to create mashup building blocks – UI services – that bring their expertise to the broader Corizon user community. Both open up many new possibilities!

Free Technical Whitepaper

2009-04-04T15:26:00.004+01:00

I have just completed a new whitepaper titled The Case for Enterprise Mashups. The paper discusses current troubles with software development and explains how Enterprise Mashups are in a perfect position to address them. You can download it here.

Leveraging core CRM with mashups

2009-03-25T10:13:00.003Z

Interesting comments from Michael Maoz at Gartner who points out that for many organizations there isn’t much choice in their core CRM provider, and that this isn’t going to change any time soon…

…. We are going to see a lot more business settling on one core platform vendor, and then wrapping around that vendor offering the best of breed components that fit into a service-orientated ecosystem. Much of that ecosystem will be Cloud-based, and many of the participants will be short-lived companies and applications, but they might just be your shortcut to market advantage.

It seems to me that this type of “wrapping” is being increasingly sought as customer service organizations are (1) struggling to drive out the efficiencies demanded by the current business climate by innovating with their existing applications and (2) figuring out how to capitalize on the opportunities from “CRM2.0”

However, depending on the path taken to incorporate that extra functionality, it might not be easy. During our 5+ years of dealing with customer service and support organizations, we’ve seen that companies often implement a core CRM platform but then hit a dead end when they try to drive efficiencies and adapt to new ways of working. Customizing and extending CRM applications can be difficult, risky, and expensive.

This is where enterprise mashups come into play, providing a low risk and innovative way to wrap components around a core platform. At Corizon we call it “integration without customization” a lightweight and rapid way to extend major applications such as Siebel or SAP to streamline core processes. The result is just the sort of service oriented approach that Michael calls for, allowing organizations to cope with participants being short lived, as organizations and the market experiment and evolve.

As organizations seek to make existing processes more efficient, enterprise mashups are taking off. Where customization created new dependencies, mashups are creating new freedoms: the freedom to modify complex business processes, and the freedom to choose the best application for every task. Businesses might have a limited menu of CRM platforms to choose from, but they have unlimited choice in how they deploy and manage them.

Enterprise Mashup as a Capability

2009-03-13T11:48:00.001Z

Why do we need Enterprise Mashups as a capability of IT? As Dion Hinchcliffe explains in this post, there is a lot unmet software demand due to small projects not being economically viable:

... almost any IT system is going cost in the hundreds of thousands or low millions even to get off the ground. This means that many smaller, niche demands, which statistically, are very likely to be larger than the demand for big IT systems in an organization (The Long Tail), are actually continuing to go dramatically underserved ...

As he further explains, Enterprise Mashups are in a perfect position to enable the business to fulfill this demand. What is not talked about, are the different deployment options of these mashups. Depending on the context of the functionality it delivers and the type of user it delivers it to, the deployment pattern of the mashup should change. For an "ad-hoc" pattern, you might want to deploy the mashup as a gadget on the desktop. For a "project" pattern you will want to deploy it inside a project portal, while for a "process" pattern you will want the mashup to be deployed as an extension to an Enterprise Application.

Choosing the wrong deployment pattern of a Enterprise Mashup could restrict its benefit and in some case dramatically increase the number of applications on the desktop. Especially when deploying an "ad-hoc" pattern where a "process" pattern would have been more appropriate, the user will suddenly need to become aware of what mashup are relevant to which task and where to find it. He or she will have to copy data to and from an Enterprise Application and mashups. The ultimate swivel chair nightmare!

So what does it mean to extend Enterprise Applications with mashup capabilities? It means facilitating the embedding of mashups inside these applications so that the business is able to add functionality to them for their specific "long tail" needs, e.g. extending a CRM application with a Network Diagnostics Mashup for the customer's region to enable the agent to anticipate and analyse possible causes of connectivity problems. By providing this capability the short lived, specific requirements of a business division can become part of the same application that is serving the long term requirements of an entire enterprise. But this time, it can deliver this to a specific user groups and for a specific process only, without requiring changes to the underlying application. This is what we at Corizon call "Integration without Customisation".

Looking for hundreds of small things with Uncle Sam

2009-03-11T18:43:00.006Z

During World War II the American government faced an unprecedented challenge: the need to increase industrial output while its workforce was depleted by troops away fighting in Europe.

To overcome the problem, the government published a guide to improving efficiency for its employees and departments. Some sentences caught my eye:

“Look for hundreds of small things you can improve. There isn’t time for major items. Look for improvements on existing jobs with present equipment.”

Sound familiar? Do you need to make changes to your business: to maintain momentum, manage through the downturn, or exploit new opportunities? How can you accomplish these goals when resources such as your workforce, sales revenues and operational cashflow are under pressure?

As the Dow hovers below 7,000 points, once-steadfast blue-chip shares trade below a dollar and every economist’s crystal ball has gone suddenly cloudy, this is not the time to throw away what you have and buy new.

Instead, any change should be incremental and designed to protect and maximize every valuable asset within your business: people, knowledge, technology infrastructure, software and successful processes.

This philosophy - to do things faster with fewer resources at lower risk - is at the heart of what Corizon does. We help businesses deliver faster, more cost effectively through an approach of incremental change: review existing processes; adapt existing applications (even eliminate redundant applications); drive user efficiency, through a succession of short, low risk projects - and by extension protect and increase revenues, profitability and customer satisfaction.

Today’s businesses and government departments would do well to leaf through some old government handbooks. There’s a lot to be learned from history.

Data vs Process Mashups

2009-02-25T12:13:00.012Z

In a recent blog Deepakalur from JackBe proposes a new tier for Enterprise Mashup. In this architecture an additional logical layer is introduced, the mashup layer, which sits between the business and presentation logic: Assuming that the presentation logic includes the application logic, this architecture makes sense for the types of mashup he is discussing, i.e. data mashup. It isn't however applicable to all types of mashups.

Ron Schmelzer from ZapThink hilightes the difference between data mashups and process mashups as the different answers to the requirement for different levels of situationality and levels repeatabilty, with process mashups deemed more appropriate for repeatable processes that require some level of situationality. At its core, process mashup are about introducing a level of agility into the process of stringing together services into an application, or SOBAs as Ron calls them:

Situationality, therefore, is not always a priority with mashups, as situationality is less important than repeatability for most automated processes. After all, the reason you'd want to automate a business process in the first place is because you expect to run the process many times, otherwise automation would never be cost-effective. Situationality and repeatability, however, are two ends of a spectrum; the interesting processes from our standpoint are the ones that fall in the middle somewhere. Such processes have a level of variability that requires a measure of situationality to the applications that implement them, while being sufficiently repeatable to warrant automation. It is such processes that process mashups (and SOA in general, for that matter) are particularly well suited for.

At Corizon we have introduced this approach to support agile development of user facing application. In this approach user requirements are met by stringing together UI Services into User Processes, as discussed here in detail. For this, a new architecture is required, one that is built to support easy rewiring of UI functions, without rebuilding the UI.

In this architecture the, different user groups can combine UI functions as they see fit, without having to create many variations of the same UI. This is critical for the succesful deployment of a process mashup.

Different types of mashups solve different problems and each of these require different architectures. So when you're embarking onto the Enterprise Mashup journey, make sure you pick the right tool for the right problem.

Innovation and conservatism in a time of recession: Enterprise mashups are the perfect blend

2009-02-24T12:35:00.006Z

In its lead column this week The Economist states: “The world has not seen a contraction like this since the first oil shock in the 1970s”.

The impact of the downturn is unprecedented for our generation, and is the largest slump to hit the technology-driven economy. It’s damaging and yet at the same time progressive, in that it drives us to think about new ways to do business and to deploy technology to innovate, transform and survive.

Businesses understand the need to invest in technologies that cut costs, enable knowledge to be shared and provide an essential competitive edge. Innovation and process transformation are fundamental, but the unpredictable climate means this is no time for big-bang approaches. They must find ways to transform their operations that require low – or no – capital investment and which produce positive, measurable results with a quick return on investment.

At Corizon, we see this philosophy in action. Enterprises that handle high volumes of customer interactions, for example, need to increase the efficiency and reduce the cost of their call centre operations while increasing the value of each customer interaction. They need to find a way to cut the cost of servicing customers – e.g. by offering customer self-service – that doesn’t involve abandoning their existing IT systems and buying expensive new ones.

This need to innovate without spending a lot of money is prompting businesses to explore better ways to improve their existing processes, applications and data. Enterprise mashups fit the bill perfectly, by allowing organisations to transform their business processes using existing applications and data in short project bursts with demonstrable return on investment.

A recent post by my colleague David Davies highlighted the staggering results that Homeserve has achieved from its use of enterprise mashups: a 50% increase in cross-sell with slashed call handling times, all using existing applications and processes.

Technologies such as enterprise mashups enable innovation to go hand in hand with conservatism. The businesses that will survive are the ones that can be conservative and creative at the same time.

Clipping mashups and UI re-use

2009-02-20T16:42:00.002Z

We’ve spotted an interesting post from Mashup Patterns author Michael Ogrinz on “clipping mashups” – techniques that extract, manipulate and reuse UI from web sites and web applications. These represent a useful, tactical approach to harvesting functionality from existing resources you may not control. It caught my eye, as this is one of the integration patterns supported by the Corizon Enterprise Mashup Platform.

This mashup approach is more than a back door into hard-to-access assets. It’s an example of an important kind of reuse at the UI level that is essential for effective mashup building. Michael is spot on when he says:

“Of course, if the … app already exposed an API, you could accomplish all of this by duplicating its interface and wiring all this up manually; but who wants to bother doing that?”

It’s a valid point. Application UI is valuable and it requires knowledge and effort to replicate. It embodies knowledge about the functional domain in question, about usability and it takes tremendous effort to write and test the code that puts that all into action. None of that is work you want to have to think about as a mashup builder. Rather, you want to be able to get the UI as a building block for your new application.

So how do you do that? Standard data feeds, web services and networked APIs don’t help, as all this capability is ’above’ them. But two types of approach are available:

Service providers provide reusable UI (aka gadgets) that you can use in your mashup, Google Maps being the prime example. You don’t need to worry about building a mapping UI, you just add what you need to one somebody else wrote.
You use a clipping approach to effectively create gadgets, where none existed before, from somebody else’s UI.

The popularity of both is testament to the need for providers of "mashables" to deliver UI as well as just data, so that mashers can work free from the problems of UI implementation.

The same ideas are needed in the enterprise context. For mashups to be effective, service providers and applications have to provide re-usable, mashable UI related to their functional domains, with the control, security and management capabilities required by the enterprise.

However, for the enterprise, much of the tangible business case for mashups comes from supporting users as they work through processes and for that, the mashup needs to weave the mashable components into a seamless, process based application. That’s not possible with stand alone widgets or clippings – you need re-usable UI that the mashup builder can manipulate and combine as required. That’s why Corizon created UI services as a kind of composable, self describing widget delivered in a controlled way and enterprise quality.

HomeServe boosts call centre productivity with Corizon

2009-01-27T15:17:00.002Z

It’s the kind of achievement that many businesses can only dream of, especially in the current economic climate. UK emergency insurer HomeServe has increased the sales that agents generate by 50%, cut average call handling times by 7% and reduce the time it takes to train new agents by 80%.

HomeServe has used Corizon’s Enterprise Mashup Platform to simplify the way its agents deal with customer calls. Corizon has been used to build a desktop application that gives inbound sales and service agents access to customer information and policy management functionality from several different business systems through a single, easy- to-use interface.

The new solution, called Gateway, lets HomeServe agents quickly find relevant customer and product information, allowing them to better understand customer needs and suggest suitable solutions. This business-focused approach is the result of a successful collaboration between the call centre operation and the IT teams, using Corizon’s visual "building block" approach to composite application construction.

With a policyholder calling HomeServe every forty seconds to request help with a household emergency, the Gateway system has meant happier customers as well as a healthier bottom line. As Jo Simkins, HomeServe’s sales director, told us: “Corizon’s low risk, high return approach to delivering key process improvements by recombining existing application investments is proving to be extremely valuable.”

You can read the full story here.

There’s enough complexity already: The need for integration without customization

2008-12-01T15:42:00.000Z

You hear a lot about how long and complicated Siebel deployments can be, but often this is just mud-slinging by rival vendors. Siebel is a great software solution – if it wasn’t, hundreds of thousands of users wouldn’t be relying on it today.

Siebel implementations *can* get bogged down, though, when organizations want to build in additional custom functionality or integrate other enterprise applications with it. These bespoke integration projects can create long delays in the Siebel rollout process – especially if the new functionality is found to have a lot of bugs that need fixing.

If this sounds like your experience, Corizon has good news. Our new Corizon for Siebel solution greatly reduces the cost and time needed to integrate applications into Siebel. Essentially, it lets you ‘mash up’ the applications you want to incorporate into Siebel into one composite application, which you can then test and modify (and re-use) independently of the Siebel environment. Once you’re happy with it, you can incorporate the composite application directly and seamlessly into the Siebel desktop.

It’s an approach that’s serving Siebel users very well. BT’s Broadband Helpdesk Change Manager, Roger Buck, told us that Corizon has significantly eased the process of incorporating additional functionality into Siebel. “Our investment in Corizon’s software has delivered full ROI in less than 12 months – remarkable when looking at enterprise software on this scale,” he said.

At Corizon we’re all about making life easier: easier customisations, easier access to vital customer data; and easier deployments of business-critical CRM systems. By removing complexity, we reduce our customers’ costs and increase the speed, flexibility and power of their CRM software. That’s not just business sense – it’s common sense.

New member of the Corizon team: Alf Saggese

2008-11-17T10:00:00.002Z

In response to growing demand and success, this week we announced that Alf Saggese has been appointed to the new post of vice president of our EMEA operations.

With more than 25 years’ experience in the customer service and CRM software markets, and with several EMEA management positions under his belt, Alf fully understands the operational side of running an EMEA-wide business. His experience has also given him a deep insight how the right combination of technologies and business processes can enhance customer satisfaction and retention.

Alf’s industry experience spans multiple sectors including telecommunications, financial services, government and high tech, giving him an understanding of the goals and challenges of organisations of many different types and sizes, and first-hand insight into how Corizon can help them to acquire and retain customers while reducing operating costs.

Alf will be a real asset to Corizon and a great leader for the EMEA team. I look forward to working with Alf to continue to grow Corizon.

Poll Time

2008-10-30T17:09:00.004Z

Considering the views on what constitutes an Enterprise Mashup are so varied, I have decided to, in true Web 2.0 style, conjure up the collective wisdom of the interwebs, and started a poll on the subject here.

The poll will run until I have enough responses, after which I will do some analysis and report back.

Speaking at the SOA Symposium

2008-10-06T21:42:00.003+01:00

I'll be speaking at the 1st International SOA Symposium in Amsterdam on 7 October, i.e. tomorrow. I'll illustrate how enterprise mashups are key to a successful SOA approach.

More details here : Composite Applications for Users

See you in the Coca Cola Lobby , 11.15 - 12.00.

Day 3 at OOW

2008-09-24T23:37:00.002+01:00

We're already on the penultimate day of Oracle Open World 2008. We've been geting loads of interested visitors at the booth, directly and indirectly via AIA. It's awesome to see people really getting the product, and being able to identify themselves with the problem it solves. Tonight is the big closing party on Treasure Island , to which Eric has managed to get tickets. It's hard work these conferences!

btw, here is a blog on the keynote in which Eric presented. Demo was indeed cool!

OOW 2008 : Here we come!

2008-09-19T17:26:00.004+01:00

The team at Corizon is all set for the trip to San Francisco. In the next few days, Eric Guilloteau, David Davies, Toby Baker and myself will be attending and presenting at the Oracle Open World 2008. Full details can be found here : http://www.corizon.com/OOW/ .

Keep an eye on this blog in the next week for live reports from the conference.

See you there!

Lightweight or Enterprise Grade?

2008-06-02T10:21:00.004+01:00

There has been a lot of talk around mashups and SOA recently, and how they do or do not fit together. One view is that mashups enable IT to visualize the SOA to the business. Another is that mashups have no place in the enterprise due to the lack of governance over what gets built, how it gets built, and who gets to use it.

In an ideal world, one would be able to provide a face to SOA in a controlled manner, a UI that has all the good things of a service: discoverable, manageable, secure, whilst providing the consumer with the ability to modify and recombine pieces of this UI as they see fit. At Corizon we have built precisely this capability: the UIService. A UIService implements a lightweight RESTful interface which provides structured access to UI elements, extending the SOA pattern to the UI:

enables service producers to provide a UI with their business services
enables service consumers to discover, consume, modify and mashup the pre-built UIs
provides central IT with the required control

The UIService is the ideal marriage of lightweight technology and enterprise grade capabilities. To learn more about them, see http://www.corizon.com/Products/ui_services.php .

Componentization vs. Service enabling

2008-05-22T10:50:00.002+01:00

One of the big attractions of a SOA is the ability to connect to and consume running (web-)services, without having to worry about how to deploy, run, and manage these services. This wasn't always the way people thought of allowing reuse. In the not too distant history, these business services would have been built as reusable binary components, which would be shared between IT projects in the business. This type of component based reuse had several drawbacks. Here are a few of them:

Updating a component required rebuilding and redeploying an application
Components had design, build, and runtime dependencies, making them more and more fragile and complex to use
Unforeseen differences in runtime environments caused unpredictable behaviour of these components that were difficult to debug and fix
Components were development environment specific, e.g. VB components wouldn't be reusable in a Powerbuilder environment
Components could, and often would, tie the consumer into vendor specific libraries
Access to the binary components allowed the consumer to reverse engineer the code
Access to the binary component put more requirements on security of the component internals
No visibility on the use of the component

For these reasons, it made sense for businesses to move to an IT infrastructure that promotes the runtime sharing of services.

With this in mind, it is interesting to see the current approach to UI reuse. Several IDEs and frameworks are creating an environment in which UI component will be shared across the business at the binary level. This will create the exact same issues as we have seen with binary reuse of business components. The only way around it is to enable the runtime reuse of UI. The technology that allows this is called a UIService and is exactly the technology we have built at Corizon.

Enterprise Mashups: Agile development in SOA

2008-02-20T13:58:00.003Z

Although not fully embraced by everyone, it is undeniably true that agile development methodologies have a number of advantages over more traditional, waterfall approaches. The key is the “release early” & “release often” mantra, allowing for continuous feedback between the analyst, end-user and developer. The end result is an application that does more of what the user needs, and less of what others think the user needs.

SOA brings together the best practices of 20 years of software architecture and design. Admittedly, none of its components are new, but never before have all these components been put together into a single open architecture. Combine this with the ubiquitous http network, and you end up with design patterns and a base technology that can make a difference in the way the business can profit from its IT.

At Corizon, we have added the UI Service to this mix: a UI Service provides the means to discover and use UI as one would when accessing data or process services. The service enabled UI, unlike gadgets, widgets and portlets, provides enough metadata and structure to allow the consumer to easily make modifications to this UI, e.g. hiding elements, moving elements or seamlessly combining two elements into one.

These three ingredients open the door to agile development of fit-for-purpose Enterprise Mashups to the end user that wasn’t possible before:

More agile : Using UIServices the solution developers don’t have to concern themselves with the problem domain of the underlying business processes, but instead can focus on the needs of the end users, reusing the prefab UI components, and assembling them into a solution.
Fit-for-purpose: The prefab UI components are built and maintained by the domain experts. This guarantees the highest quality of “raw materials” for the consumer. In addition by providing the UIService consumers with the capability to modify the UI to fit their needs, the solution developer is able to deliver an application that is fit-for-purpose.

Without UI Services, this agile development of fit-for-purpose Enterprise Mashups will require too many compromises, resulting in a slower release cycle and a far from ideal user interface.