Q&A Series: The Future of EA and BPA
Posted by: Sandra Moran on: January 25, 2012
Today I’m continuing my Q&A series on frequent questions asked about enterprise architecture and business process analysis tools. Over the past few months there has been a lot of chatter around the future of EA and BPA. Here’s another installment on the future of this market and the best way to leverage these tools to drive positive change in your organization.
Question: Where do you think this market is going? Do you see other tools coming into play?
Human vs. Machine: How Adaptive Case Management Helps Insurance Firms Serve Customers
Posted by: Deb Miller on: January 4, 2012
Have you seen the movie Real Steel? In the storyline of this flick, automation has replaced human fighters with 2000-pound, 8-foot-tall steel robot boxers. The moral is “humans out, automation in” — end of story, right? Not exactly. As it turns out, it’s the right combination of human and machine that proves necessary for the win. Sounds a lot like business process improvement to me.
How does this notion of human and machine translate to success in the business world? Legendary fighter and advisor to the movie Sugar Ray Leonard tells us that we are actually seeing a story about relationships in Real Steel. That is, the importance of the relationship between Hugh Jackman, the ex-boxer now “corner man” and Atom, his robot fighter. It is that enabling (some might say co-dependent) relationship that leads to their success. Herein lies the lesson learned for business — while automation is required, it is not sufficient for success. I have seen that hold true in my world of business process solutions where adaptive case management and knowledge workers team up to drive productivity.
When It Comes to Mobile Apps – Thin is In!
Posted by: Kevin Haugh on: December 20, 2011
One of the big topics of discussion regarding mobile is whether the mobile app market is moving towards native apps that are OS/device specific, or whether it is moving towards device neutral platforms such as HTML5. Today the mobile market is marked by a combination of native apps, device neutral apps and hybrid apps which fall somewhere in between. One of the big drivers for native apps has been the richer user experience and capability possible through such apps. Mobile operating systems have allowed applications to access lower level features available in mobile devices such as the camera, GPS and local data storage. It is these very features, not historically supported through device independent platform such as HTML, that have brought some of the most compelling capabilities to mobile devices and the market. But the down side to native apps is that it has made it much more difficult to build and deploy apps broadly since doing so has required separate apps to be built to run on each environment.
In an effort to achieve some of the best of both worlds hybrid approaches have been developed which wrap applications designed to be largely OS independent with code designed to provide access to the lower level device features and capability. A number of vendors including OpenText have developed mobile frameworks to facilitate the creation of such hybrid apps. See for example the Mobile Wave Platform.
