Improved IT through functional building blocks

Since it first became viable for use in business, IT has provided many benefits to organisations, from automating repetitive tasks through to streamlining and speeding business processes. Yet, for all its benefits, most IT solutions used today are still disjointed conglomerations of different products that are difficult to implement and use.

"Business applications were traditionally created by organisations using their choice of development environment to create the software they needed to run their business effectively," says Sybille McCloghrie, group business development director of COSA.

"To reduce the amount of technical work required, different ideas, from CASE tools to object technology and component reuse, were conceived, some more successful than others. This was followed by the development of other functionality needed to keep systems in sync, such as workflow, middleware, data mining, integration and portals.

"Naturally software vendors were quick to offer this functionality ready-made to customers to allow businesses to skip developing these complex components themselves. Unfortunately, even though the components were available, the complexity of installing and integrating them with other systems was excruciatingly painful."

Out of this pain arose a new concept, the smart enterprise suite (SES). Gartner first identified the SES in 2002, defining it as a combination of portal, collaborative and content management functionality (other functionality, such as analytics can also be included in the SES as the goal is to have a secure, yet open system that integrates easily with whatever functionality the business requires). The main thrust of SES is that companies needing to develop and integrate new business functionality should be able to do so without the problems of assembling and integrating IT functionality.

In other words, the SES architecture bundles application functionality into a single product, which, in theory, would be cheaper and easier to integrate and maintain than traditional IT systems.

"SES makes it faster and less costly to deliver solutions to the business as all the underlying plumbing is already there, waiting for the new functionality to be slotted in," adds McCloghrie. "The business solution builder therefore only need concentrate on building business solutions."

McCloghrie adds that using a SES is like owning and driving a car: you choose the specifics of the car and then you drive it. There are no concerns about integrating the braking system with the wheels, or the steering wheel: everything is ready to be used. Of course, once you have your car you`re stuck with a particular model and what it offers - and first-generation SES offerings were much the same.

The next step in the evolution of the SES is to incorporate more technology components into the architecture, but also to make the architecture less IT-oriented and more business-focused. The idea is to have components consisting of business functionality that can be slotted into the system as needed.

"The current iteration of the SES does not natively understand what a customer or an invoice is," notes McCloghrie. "In future the architecture will have these business components built in and ready for use when needed without additional work. Business people will be able to focus on business without waiting for IT to catch up and deliver what they need, making the organisation more agile and flexible."

The SES of the future will enable businesses to adapt to changing markets with the least effort because there will be fewer requirements to develop and build new functionality. A company will be able to slot technical and business components into its architecture without worrying about integration and compatibility issues.

"In future, your IT architecture will already know what a customer is and all the attributes associated with a customer," McCloghrie adds. "When the company needs to develop new functionality dealing with customers, they will only have to slot the new functionality into the existing customer component, everything else will already be taken care of."

Software developers have been talking about componentised development for years, envisioning an IT world in which users could simply select components off the shelf and see them automatically integrated into their infrastructures without any additional coding. The SES offers this type of solution and the next-generation architecture will extend beyond the realm of IT and start to offer the same building-block functionality to business users. The gap between IT and business is narrower than ever.