Business Architecture: Consolidation vs. Integration

The enterprise IT market is often characterized by fragmented products for specific applications. Although their hard-coded functionality may seem sufficient for the intended purpose it is time and again overlooked how much effort it takes to integrate them via XML and SOA.

The Business Architecture concept of ISIS Papyrus therefore provides businesses with a single consolidated information system that offers collaboration, process coordination and role coaching on top of the background data processing. This single information platform enables a business to model its key information assets, to support its process workgroups and to create and retain the knowledge about how the business actually performs its processes. All this knowledge and experience is shared between workgroups according to authority. Management can monitor quality criteria and audit each single process if needed. Because it is a single life-cycle platform, software borders do not exist and process optimization is a continuous exercise that does not require complex projects.

Enterprise architects who hope to  create an infrastructure of replaceable components by segmenting and layering various products have to consider poor compliance to standards and continuously changing products. These are major stumbling blocks for an enterprise architecture, whereas ISIS Papyrus integrates seamlessly with legacy applications to provide instant benefits with its rich functionality and platform and output channel independence. On the long term it provides an application infrastructure that allows for a gradual enterprise strategy towards consolidation with no additional integration efforts.

Shaping The Customer Experience For Profitability

In mature markets with fierce competition there are usually two broad strategies to foster growth and become more profitable. The first strategy is to be price aggressive. This strategy is especially popular in downturns or to drive competition out of the market. Yet it is a shortsighted strategy and does not do much for profitability on the long run even if it may be instantly successful for a short time in growth terms. If businesses cut their margins this usually initiates a risky downward spiral. Reduced margins are often followed soon by some cost cutting, which then results in poorer service and product quality or the complete elimination of services, layoffs, still more reduced capacity of servicing customers, ensuing negative publicity and word of mouth and a long and often futile struggle to bring back margins to healthy levels.

The other strategy encompasses the shift to a customer-driven organization. Now this term is used in abundance but what is it all about? The main idea behind the customer-driven approach is that of another transformation taking place, namely from the notion of products and services as a commodity to that of shaping the perception by the customer (“the experience”) in a very particular way that is a real differentiation from the competition. However easy it sounds this transformation is not something that can be achieved overnight and it is certainly no one-off procedure.

A customer-driven approach is marked by flexibility and quality. Flexibility means an organization’s capability to accommodate different customer preferences (which may change over time); quality means that all customer communications have to be accurate, clear, consistent and relevant. Relevant communication again is personal and relating to individual context based on consolidated data. These are cornerstones in building long-term customer relationships which result in increased loyalty and revenue.

ISIS Papyrus understands the challenges large corporations face to manage processes and to produce, manage and distribute personalized, data-driven and process- related customer communications to remain competitive in today’s market. ISIS consultants analyze a corporation’s unique communication goals and then provide the tools and expertise necessary to produce high-volume, personalized paper and electronic communications that significantly improve customer and prospect responses as well as client satisfaction.

The Need For A Business Architecture

The main goal of a Business Architecture as has been stated by Max J. Pucher, Chief Architect at ISIS Papyrus, is to enable the business to improve the quality of its customer services quality through transparent, flexible and adaptable business operations. Fast-paced changes in the market environment and the use of new technologies by customers have dramatic impacts on how to run a business. Some industries face changes in their calculation processes, marketing programs, business rules and content already on a weekly rather than a monthly basis.

It is obvious that the state of the communication content controls the process and not its meaningless steps. Business communication is not just a document or an email, but can be anything: a selection menu, a web page, a sticker on the document, a data record, images, or even a voice recording or video. No matter how much time and money is spent on business process analysis, there will always be one more communication item needed for a business process once it gets going. This is why collaboration tools and email are now so pervasive. They don’t require analysis to communicate.

With this in mind ISIS Papyrus has developed its Platform that does not require a huge technology stack and does not need complex programming but a simple modeling and rule definition methodology to build a flexible and adaptable Business Architecture that is mostly under the control of the business and not the IT department. Business experts can now rapidly model, measure, and change processes independently of underlying application logic. Papyrus does not require additional separate rule engines or collaborative mapping layers to enable processes to dynamically adapt to changing business needs. The collaborative ISIS Papyrus Platform approach does not restrict the business users in their execution but guides them by the process definitions, monitored by business rules and measured by goal fulfillment without the need for Eclipse-based integration between the different product fragments of one or multiple software vendors. Papyrus provides seamless consolidation of freely definable processes, rules, GUI, forms, inbound and outbound content objects.