Supply & Demand Chain Executive writes:
businesses must now embrace emerging opportunities and make strategic decisions about technology that will transform their business processes and give them competitive advantage, the technology consultancy Gartner argued at its recent ITxpo show.
Gartner warned that a focus on short-term local automation initiatives is leaving IT with diminishing returns to the business. The challenge for IT is to provide the means to extend business capabilities, the consultancy argued, suggesting that a return in focus on business processes, enabled by the emergence of new software platforms and architectures, can achieve this. Gartner termed this “business process fusion” and said that the transformation of business processes is a major step towards building a so-called “real-time enterprise.”
Gartner believes that business process fusion builds on the maturing capabilities of systems integration and systems access technology to support the creation of new processes that increase the speed and flow of corporate information. It enables planning, optimization, simulation and other performance management activities to take place on a broader scale than previously, according to the consultancy.
According to Gartner, the technology drivers and enablers for business process fusion now ready to use are:
Explicit process representation in integration brokers and portal frameworks
Service-oriented architecture and composite application technology that are delivered by integrated service environments and integration brokers for “wrapping” legacy systems
Metadata management and application-independent XML data definitions that are incorporated in integrated service environments and data synchronization tools
The development of common definitions for the main data items that are used in various industry sectors
Advanced portal-based integration that supports roles and personalization
Unified information stores and access methods
