Doing business in the future, now

Integrating applications together is extremely difficult and usually expensive. It always has been. But integrating applications is just a means to an end, not the goal - the real goal is integrating business processes (and hopefully simplifying them). To achieve that, organizations that wish to thrive in the 21st century must do a better job of integrating their processes - not only within their organization, but between themselves and their partners, and also perhaps with their key customers as well.

But doing that is harder than saying it!  Business processes need to be automated and integrated more effectively.  Organizations will also need to embrace the global marketplace in order to expand the market for their goods and services.  These are three key characteristics of the global marketplace which is called the Internet.

Business at all times of the day

24*7 is the goal here, your business cannot sleep.  Lost opportunities will abound in this "global village" where China is awake and looking for customers while the US sleeps.  The businesses which operate 24 hours a day and 7 days a week will be the winners.

Business without human intervention

"95% of all documents used for data entry are computer generated." - Dennis Keeling, Business and Accounting Software Developers Association.  With that remarkable statistic, you have to ask yourself why those 95% of the documents which were computer generated, weren't automtatically inputted by that same computer application, into the next one?!

Process-based systems

A large organization typically has a huge number of business processes.  Each one of those business processes usually has at least one or more applications which try to define and reinforce that process.  Unluckily for some businesses, the applications constrain the process and eventually the process itself is hampered by the computer system.  These businesses end up with the classic 'can't live with it and can't live without it'.  These businesses end up spending huge amounts of money rewriting these systems, or simply buying ERP software to get rid of this expensive problem.

But how did we come to be in this situation?  Most business systems are built around a business process, but inevitably the process evolves with the growth of the business.  So, first the company builds a system and incrementally builds on it.  Systems begin to be merged with other systems and inevitably there is an attempt to rationalize them all.  Larger and more wealthy corporates have also tried to en-masse replace the bits and pieces which have built up over time (or to solve the problem by outsourcing!).  But in the end, this mish-mash of computer applications usually require some form of human intervention to ensure they work together.

There must be a better way to build flexible systems into which you can plug new data, swap or move data sources and which can adjust to reflect the changing business processes for which they were designed.  There is and this online book, BizTalk Online Series, will identify how!

Waves of eCommerce

Let's face it, the vast number of businesses which exist in the world, are offline businesses.  Many of these businesses have manual processes to interact with their partners and these processes include telephone, email, faxes and so on.

With the advent of the Internet, there is an opportunity to change this.  The next wave of eCommerce will induce application integration across multiple organizations and their processes.  Trading partners are turning to the Internet to:

• automate supply chains,
• combine forecasting systems into worldwide Internet-based just-in-time orders (eJIT),
• integrate and automate government services (and thereby reduce necessary interference), and
• leverage countless new and interesting business strategies.

Most companies have enough difficulty (and cost) building and integrating systems together within their own businesses, you may be wondering just how are we going to achieve all this communication on a broad scale over the Internet?  The essential problems all businesses face are that there is too much information and it is in too many different formats, reports or databases.  When a business has committed to ordering that data in order to interacting with their partners, it requires an enormous amount of software to be built and inevitably there are not enough skills available.

The advent of the Internet has turned heads as the scale of the opportunity is immense.  The computer industry took 10 years to grow from US$0.00 to a US$100 billion industry, the Internet has taken 5 years from zero to US$400 billion - and this is only the start!  Everyone is not yet online and even the ones who are online have not truly begun to benefit from the new efficiencies which can be achieved by leveraging it.

In fact, the adoption of the Internet into the core of companies has been very surprising.  In a Dataquest study, the businesses surveyed showed that almost all of them had set up a company website (an online brochure) and 81% were enabling the Internet for internal use within the organization.  Remarkably, 27% and 26% were allowing the customer/supplier access to their core systems (via the Internet) and also allowing transactional access to their core systems.

Source: Dataquest (January 2000), published by Gartner.

Allowing customer access to your core systems or allowing cross-boundary and transactional access to your internal systems (in a controlled and secure way) is where BizTalk is especially useful.  It is uniquely capable of connect the world's business systems together.  This is an immense claim of course!  Businesses are already communicating with each other in various ways, but now that this huge network is available, they will begin communicating over it using BizTalk.

NOTE:  The sheer numbers of participants (such as governments, companies, objects and of course people) which will try to communicate with each other is simply staggering.