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Blog Industry Insights Convergence: A Winning Business Strategy, Now Ready for Enterprise Information - Part Two
Blog Industry Insights Convergence: A Winning Business Strategy, Now Ready for Enterprise Information - Part Two
18 August 2011
In my last post I described how a convergence strategy — building a platform that enables consolidation across products and even entire industries — produces massive profits and growth. Now I want to focus on how a convergence strategy can be applied within the enterprise.
As I have previously mentioned, unified information access (UIA) is a fundamental element of a successful convergence strategy. It's not possible to offer a consolidated experience if the information required by end-users is trapped in silos. But information is only part of the problem; end users also need applications and supporting business logic. In an era where lean IT is the standard, is it reasonable to expect that the latter two will be easily integrated?
While it is possible to extract the information and unify it, can we really imagine having one application to do our entire, complicated job?
The answer is that this is exactly what Apple faced in the B2C market. The same solution will work and will yield extreme results. Instead of taking an evolutionary view that the application silos will be knitted together through modest, "baby step" improvements over many years, take a revolutionary view: do it all at once! It's the only way it will really work.
Here's a cookbook for adopting a successful convergence strategy.
1. Pick a set of applications that matter to some group of end users; customers who generate revenue are probably the best choice.
2. If you haven't already, set up teams who will sustain these applications.
3. Extract the information from each application and unify it with a UIA platform. This will take some time and effort, but it is the prerequisite for everything else you will do, and the significant benefit that will result.
4. Link and organize the information together automatically, using taxonomies, ontologies and text analytics like entity extraction.
5. Wrap the underlying application APIs up into new, converged APIs that implement the common operations people will want to apply to the information. For example, if you have 10 systems that handle sales, you want to have one new sellStuff() method that handles the behavior for all 10 systems. You can use an Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) or some sort of middleware to do this; but a complete UIA platform like Attivio's Active Intelligence Engine will have built-in workflow systems that can handle this task already.
6. Build a convergence application that showcases the information effectively, regardless of which application it came from. It should at minimum allow users to query across all silos, and then invoke the most common operations as appropriate to whatever results were ultimately selected as relevant. Make sure this convergence application — which is really the platform (along with the back-end) for offering a consolidated experience — can be expanded without rewriting — through a modular approach.
7. Layer on capabilities that further drive productivity, conversion or collaboration — such as personalization and collaboration.
The architecture ends up looking like this:
In time, you will realize massive cost-savings as you stop investing in each application (and each update) for the end-users. The converged application will cost less in terms of training and support, while keeping people engaged with a truly integrated approach to their interactions with your company — yielding pervasive new revenue opportunities.
Attivio is proud to work with several organizations that have successfully implemented enterprise information convergence. If you'd like to learn more about this, please contact us.
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Daniel
said:
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... How long would you say it takes for the average organization to ramp up? It sounds like there is a manageable learning curve... true? |
Sid Probstein
said:
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... The learning curve is totally manageable. Organizations that pursue convergence generally select tools they are comfortable with, and focus on integrating information and methods from systems that are already in use. You can take a totally incremental approach, i.e. start with the handful of applications and methods that matter the most, then move on to the rest. Once you are done, it is possible to start layering on fundamentally new capabilities like social networking/collaboration. Thanks for the comment! |
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