Middleware Systems’ Dependability and Service Orientation

Middleware systems are also sometimes called transparencies like the location transparency, network transparency. It helps in decreasing the burden of developing distributed application.

Middleware systems support the development of distributed applications in networked environments. It also involves systems integration. Middleware systems make this task more efficient and less error prone.

Middleware systems also mean software technologies to help manage the heterogeneity and complexity in the development of the distributed applications and information systems. It also connotes to a layer of software above the operating system but below the application that provide a common programming abstraction. It, hence, provides for a greater level programming than the APIs or the Application Programming Interfaces.

Middleware systems comprises of services and abstractions to help the deployment, integration, design and development of distributed applications in heterogeneous networks. Some examples of middleware systems are event notification and messaging services like Java Messaging Service; remote communication mechanisms like Java RMI, CORBA, etc or naming services like LDAP. CORBA, DCOM, COM+, .Net Remoting, application servers constitute middleware systems.

Middleware systems are also sometimes called transparencies like the location transparency, network transparency. It helps in decreasing the burden of developing distributed application. There are various categories of middleware systems like remote procedure call, naming and directory services, message oriented middleware, distributed object middleware, remote invocation mechanisms, etc. Middleware systems are also sometimes informally called plumbing as it connects the data pipes with some parts of the distributed applications and then the data is passed through them.

Middleware systems are also called “glue” technology as they are usually used to link the legacy components. It is also very useful for binding network devices such as mobile base stations and routers to provide network integrators.

Thanks for reading our article! Are you searching for a middleware consultant or service provider in the UK? Integrella is a leading provider of middleware services. Take a look at our website for more information!

How Middleware Is Helping The Medical Sector To Maximize Investment and Increase Quality

The application of middleware can sometimes seem elusive to grasp. Read about how it has become a necessity in the medical sector to craft connectivity between disparate systems within your IT framework, which will ultimately lead to increased ROI on investments and quality control improvements.

Over the past few years, middleware has really come into its own as a mainstream solution for helping organisations across a wide spectrum of business sectors succeed in streamlining work processes and improving data sharing. As medical organisations such as hospitals and laboratories are constantly being challenged by the advent of new technologies and regulations, administrators are constantly looking to deliver new ways of increasing productivity through applications such as middleware. As a result, laboratories are exploiting middleware in many other key areas of their business and realizing its true value. They are leveraging their investment with new and innovative applications of middleware.

Autoverification

Autoverification represents a solution to a wide range of issues: increased financial constraints, decreased reimbursements, increasing volumes of testing, increased regulatory constraints, demands for decreased response time, and higher expectations of quality. To add to the problem, there is a constantly decreasing pool of qualified personnel to do the work and growing fatigue among this group. With middleware, it is common for autoverification in general/ community/university hospital environments to reach levels as high as 90 percent. In reference laboratories it reaches 95 percent or higher. Some of the benefits are:

* Decreased turnaround times for routine and STATs, which is immediately followed by a significant decrease in the number of STATs;

* Higher consistency in the quality of results, which are being evaluated consistently across all shifts and all laboratories in a hospital organization–every day and in the same way;

* Reduced staff fatigue, which improves the work environment and allows medical technologists to focus on the true “problem” samples;

* The fact that special processing requests from physicians can be easily automated and accommodated; further differentiating laboratory services; and

* In growing number of sites, savings in FTEs that are allowing the laboratory to bring additional test methods in-house that were traditionally sent out or to expand into the emerging area of molecular testing.

Many labs’ first attempt to build autoverification systems was with their Laboratory Information System (LIS), usually starting in one work area such as Coagulation or Hematology. Often the first people to seek out middleware were typically trying to fill “gaps,” that is, the absence of functionality, in their LIS, instrumentation and/or automation systems or to improve systems that were not reaching desired autoverification levels. Later adopters came to realize that middleware could be configured more easily or function better than what they already had in place. They were not replacing the LIS, but supplementing the functionality pool to reach more work areas and achieve higher levels of autoverification.

The rules-based decision processing in middleware allows for an “intelligent” verification process and the ability to go beyond reference ranges. Now laboratorians write physician-specific, ward-specific, practice-specific rules that interact in real time with instrumentation and results production while incorporating quality control functions that far exceed the capabilities of most LIS systems.

Quality control and quality assurance

Quality is the cornerstone of any business or organisation. Quality control is one of the most important and probably the least appreciated activities in the laboratory. Few have quantified in time, effort, and expense what their existing quality systems cost the laboratory. Integrated with autoverification processes, middleware can improve quality and provide consistency across multiple work areas while reducing time and oversight of your quality processes.

Real-time, Interactive Quality Control: It is commonplace for laboratories to waste many hours each week transposing quality control information into third-party software only to discover days or weeks later that they have a quality issue. Then they spend countless hours trying to determine, “Is it me, or is everyone having this problem?” What these current processes lack is real-time monitoring and direct interaction with results production and expert analysis tools and information.

This is where middleware has changed the dynamics of current processes and is providing consistent compliance and improving quality without undue oversight or financial burden. Not only-does middleware act as a real-time conduit of information between your LIS and instruments, but it also provides information to third-party Quality Control (QC) software, such as Bio-Rad’s Unity Real Time.

Middleware eliminates the manual transposing of information or manual importing, allowing the laboratory to participate in web-based, inter-laboratory peer-grouping that provides the “sanity checking” and troubleshooting resources.

But reducing the data errors and providing QC in real time is only part of the benefit. The other part of the equation is interacting with your result production in real-time.

The middleware’s internal QC package or conduits to industry leading, third party packages allows QC and middleware to be integrated with your results production. When a QC violation occurs, rules-based decision logic in middleware starts immediately, flagging and holding results affected, and promptly alerts the appropriate laboratory staff by email, pagers and even light poles and network notifications.

Monitor Moving Averages in Real Time: Middleware has brought moving averages to the forefront as a key component for a comprehensive quality assurance system. The concept of average of normal (AON) or Moving Averages is not new. It was first proposed for the clinical laboratory by Hoffman and Wlad in 1965 (1) but its adoption has been hindered by the programs’ lack of capability in implementing Moving Averages, with the exception of Bull’s algorithm in most Hematology instruments.

Moving Averages is a tool to continuously monitor stability, by using patient samples to measure instrument and assay performance. It provides early detection and notification for subtle analytical shifts not always detected by event driven QC methods.

Many middleware systems now employ Moving Averages, allowing this functionality to be applied in a broad spectrum of disciplines, most notably automated chemistry, and doing so in real time. Users are able to define which assays to monitor and the number of results needed to generate a point and to choose multiple algorithms to use.

Levy Jennings’ chart allows laboratorians to monitor the performance of multiple instruments in the multiple work areas in multiple facilities. Users have the ability to define actions when user defined thresholds are crossed, and more sophisticated implementations allow laboratorians the ability to segment data, such as the ability to monitor renal dialysis patients differently than outreach patients.

Integration with Quality Assurance Systems: Middleware has changed the method and the frequency with which laboratorians are correlation testing, verifying reference ranges, and establishing normal values. Traditionally labs have performed their calculation checks every six months due to the tedious nature of gathering data. Many Quality Assurance systems, such as EPEvaluator, are able to acquire data directly from information-rich middleware, eliminating hours, if not days, of gathering and retyping data to comply with CAP requirements. Not only does this save effort and avoid mistyping of data, but it encourages the laboratory to shift from minimal frequency to a continuous and ongoing basis.

With many middleware systems being ODBC-compliant, laboratories using their own ‘homegrown’ spreadsheets can now acquire data directly from their middleware systems.

Redefining instrument interfacing

The demand for highly integrated work areas is growing. Interfacing instruments typically have meant connecting the instrument to the LIS and exchanging test instructions and test results. The demand for interfacing is being replaced by integration: the interoperability of two or more systems to automate diagnostic testing. The Hematology workcell is a prime example of this growing need for integration with the automated digital cell morphology. Most LIS systems are not able to reflex one instrument’s results, comments and/or flags to other instruments. But with the growing demand for automated digital cell morphology instruments, such as CellaVision DM96, information from automated cell counters combined with rules-based decision processing are needed to automate areas of Hematology that have been manually intensive processes. Middleware has not only facilitated the interfacing but is leading the integration and automation of this integration.

Hematology is not the only example. Middleware is also leading the way to integrate Molecular workcells by coordinating and managing the preparation, amplification and specimen handling that these emerging work areas require.

Sample Storage and Retrieval

Most labs incorporate a variety of manual methods. Some are store intensive, meaning they require a significant amount of time to place samples in a particular order to make retrieval faster. Some are the inverse, where storing is fast but retrieval is tedious, involving sorting through hundreds of samples. It is so painful that I have witnessed med techs playing ‘rock-paper-scissors’ to decide who gets to find samples.

Previous market research has shown the average time to retrieve a sample is 12 to 15 minutes and involves at least one FTE. The cost for this non-revenue generating task is enormous. It is one of the easiest problems to solve, but the most overlooked of them all. To help quantify the cost of this process, I will use an “average” laboratory with 1500 samples/slides/cups to store every day; its current method takes two seconds per specimen to store. It retrieves 2 percent of specimens per day for retesting at an average of 15 minutes per sample to retrieve. Using the calculations below, it is spending 8.33 hours per day storing and retrieving specimens.

That equates to a full FTE dedicated to this procedure. Using an average salary of $21.52/hour, that is $65,457 annualized. Using the findings of AACC middleware presentation in 2001 (2) and using our example laboratory, that same process would only cost $10,473 annually–a savings of $54,984.

Some middleware solutions that address sample storage and retrieval issues can be implemented in less than a day, require no LIS interfacing, and pay for themselves in weeks or months. Also, automated archiving systems can be integrated for high-volume areas and still provide full-sample tracking for all disciplines.

Beyond Traditional Boundaries

Middleware is not just limited to clinical pathology. Other diagnostic areas such as pulmonary diagnostics are leveraging middleware to improve diagnostic care and allowing the integration with multiple information systems, including EMR/HER systems, to automate the delivery of timely, quality, actionable healthcare information.

Even traditionally separate areas of the laboratory are being bridged, as middleware is now providing clinical pathology results to anatomical pathology systems, allowing the exchange of critical patient results.

The increased use of middleware has become an integral part in helping laboratories decrease costs and increase quality. With the day-to-day challenges that these organizations are being faced with, it is more important now than ever to evaluate what middleware can do for you.

Oracle Fusion Middleware: A Primer For The Non-IT Decision Maker

If you’re a decision-maker at a company that doesn’t use Oracle — even if you’re not in IT — the keyword Oracle Fusion Middleware is probably a term that seems to haunt you. To be sure, Oracle is one of the predominant business technology platforms of the market today, and one of the most deployed and supported. But for as much as Oracle is a proven business solution that is used by a wide range of top businesses, its purpose and application can seem a bit a nebulous to someone without a technological background.

Before you go into your next planning meeting and are forced to either nod/shake your head in agreement/disagreement, or otherwise look like you have no idea what’s going on, here is a concise primer for what Oracle Fusion Middleware is, and what it might be able to do for your company’s bottom line.

Oracle has always been a company about delivering IT business solutions. Since its inception, it has provided a suite of software that was meant to be used together by businesses so that business processes would be as standardized and streamlined as possible. Even after Oracle had launched its Fusion product, however, all of the different stacks of software included in the suite were separate from one another; while there was an effort to make the software all uniform in design, there was still a disconnectedness between the software included within the suite.

Oracle EMEA SVP for middleware Andrew Sutherland reveals in an interesting interview with ZDNET that:

“At the beginning of the Fusion programme, Sutherland said the Oracle technology resembled a series of disconnected icebergs. Users only saw the front end of the technology they used while the code supporting this user experience was hidden.

‘What we discovered was that as we looked at our customers’ organisations, they weren’t running their applications as a single stack. They were running multiple icebergs. What they weren’t seeing was that eight-ninths of the costs were sitting below the waterline,’ Sutherland said.”

Thus, the crux of Oracle Fusion Middleware today as we know it was to bring all of the software together under one unified back end, thus making it much more user-friendly and capable of sharing data. This, of course, is at the heart of middleware; it is the “connective tissue” that brings together disparate software systems and allows them to communicate effectively. And because delivering operational savings and productivity increases was at the heart of Fusion’s upgrade, that’s exactly what Oracle seeks to sell its customers on with Oracle Fusion Middleware.

The other big advantage of having all of a company’s IT solutions under one unified back-end, as Sutherland explains, “you’d have [the back-end technology] once, you’d have business intelligence here once, you’d have a portal, you’d have sign-on, you would have your process engine all in there at one time.” Not only does this make the business solution much easier to use, but also it allows for big businesses to plug in new software solutions that work seamlessly with older applications: “The applications all use the same back-end technology, which forms the middleware stack, and so can easily be integrated with each other and plugged into the middleware when businesses want to add them.”

This is the beauty of a middleware solution like Oracle Fusion Middleware. It allows the following:

• By having a middleware platform that can support all Oracle applications, businesses should be able to reduce their costs when implementing and integrating technology.
• When they add new applications onto the platform they know that the underlying technology within the middleware will be certified. That certification means they won’t have to check every piece of software individually.
• Any upgrades to the middleware also only need to be done once because the applications running will be able to access the upgrades due to the way they’re integrated into the Fusion platform using service-oriented architecture (SOA).
• The applications themselves will also provide benefits as they will be better integrated with each other and will be able to make use of additional functionality embedded in the middleware.
• When applications are being set up, IT departments can use the middleware to add elements, such as business intelligence, collaboration and security, which aren’t already part of the applications themselves.

So, what are the applications? Simply put, Oracle Fusion Middleware provides all of the most critical business management software solutions that companies need to do business. Current fusion applications include: CRM, financials, government risk and compliance, human-capital management, procurement, project portfolio management and supply-chain management. And this list is always continuously growing and expanding, in order to encompass a wider range of needed tasks.

Of course, there is still much more to the world of Oracle Fusion Middleware that what this little blog post covers. But hopefully from this article you, the business professional, can get a better understanding of how it can come to make a huge difference in your company’s bottom line.

Business Integration Consultancy: Bringing Strategy & Technology Together

Most successful companies have come to realise that, in order to perform well in competitive industries, comprehensive business integration is now a necessity. This is particularly true if your organization depends heavily on technology: the need to respond to changing market demands and improving technologies means that deploying a flexible, streamlined business integration solution is a critical task — and an ongoing one.

IT departments are often eager to plug in new applications and business solutions in order to accommodate new business processes. And while this process is necessary, it almost always created a gap. The gap widens every time a new application or software is introduced into the business process. Thus, if the business integration solution is not flexible, scalable, and consistently maintained, disparate systems will inevitably lead to breakdowns in productivity and data sharing.

While IT will always be willing and able to develop and/or deploy new software, they often lack the specific expertise to craft middle solutions. Even more, the inherent problem with tackling business integration in-house is that its success is not merely hinged on technology; business integration is the conflation of both strategy and technology.

This is why a business integration consultant is so critical to launching and maintaining effective business integration solutions — particularly for larger corporations dealing with disparate systems and legacy software that needs to be reconciled with new solutions. A competent consultant leverages skill sets in both strategy and technology: the consultancy understands that business strategy constitutes the exterior aspect of the organization, whereas technology encompasses data access, application interface and process renovation—elements that are essential to have a functional organization.

While an IT department will default to seeing business integration needs primarily from the technological perspective, business professionals only think of business processes in the abstract, without having a sense of whether their process requirements can be attained via middleware. A consultant can mediate these two teams of stakeholders in the business integration process.

When looking outside of your organisation for an effective business integration consultant, look for one that addresses the solution primarily from a business stake holder’s perspective. To be sure, this is a standard “pitch” for many consultancies, since they often recognize that they ultimately have to sell their services and solution to non-tech executives. That being said, a consultant should be able to demonstrate that they understand your company’s specific needs, and offer business integration solutions that are tangible to the stakeholder. While they could mire you in the technical details, it is more important that they grasp your company’s needs at a higher level of abstraction than the IT view.

We’ve talked on the portal before about the importance of understanding the differences between business process modeling and service oriented architecture, stating that BPM essentially comes before SOA, and that SOA is a “means to an end.” If we take this line of thinking one step further, then we can see business integration as the discipline that encompassed both BPM and SOA. As a result, it is essential to have a business integration consultant at the helm of visualizing, implementing, and maintaining all new integration solutions.

Thanks for reading our article! Be sure to read more about how Integrella can manage all of your business integration needs. 

SOA as a Critical Component of Enterprise Architecture

Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) has promised many benefits for both IT and business. As a result, it has been widely adopted as an architectural style among both private business and government enterprises. Despite SOA’s popularity, however, relatively few of these enterprises are able to measure and demonstrate the value of SOA to their organization. What is the problem and why is it so hard to demonstrate that SOA can deliver the much needed business value it promises?

In this post we will point out some root causes for this problem and highlight how Bodhtree experience, Define and Govern Service-Oriented Architectures can help organizations maximize their return on investment with SOA.

The main problem is rooted in the way SOA adoption is approached. In most cases, organizations approach SOA by limiting the scope to individual solution implementation projects – using it purely as a tool to group software functions into services described by some standard interface. As a result, each SOA implementation is disconnected and void of the larger business problem context. This creates disconnected, technology-focused SOA silos that are difficult to manage and govern. Reuse of services across business lines, arguably one of the main advantages of SOA, in turn becomes very limited if not impossible without increased cost of integration.

SOA calls for standard-based service infrastructure that requires big investment. Many IT organizations struggle to establish a common SOA infrastructure, but fail to do so. The main reason for this failure is again the way SOA is approached in those organizations; limiting SOA’s scope to solution projects makes it hard for individual projects to justify the investment in service infrastructure. As a result they fall back to their tactical implementation which cannot be reused by other projects down the road.

SOA, as an architectural style, becomes recognized as part of the organization’s overall Enterprise Architecture instead of leaving it linked to only individual projects. SOA projects in the enterprise share a larger enterprise context and each project adds value to the whole enterprise business in an incremental, reusable fashion.

SOA concepts can be incorporated into the strategy by indentifying the business areas or segments in the enterprise that benefit from a SOA approach. Likewise, the strategy could point out the areas in which SOA is not adding any value to the business.

This allows users to identify the expected key metrics from the start and focus their SOA investment on high value projects. This also makes sure that each smaller SOA project is initiated in the context of larger business objectives and as such, can add measurable business value.

Where To Position Enterprise Content Management With BPM, SOA

Read about where and how to reconcile Enterprise Content Management, or ECM, with BPM and SOA.

If you follow new trends and best practices in BPM and SOa, then you already know how it seems as if there is always a new acronym to learn. Self-styled “gurus” in these fields of business theory are always looking to brand a new process or way of approaching optimisation and architecture. Because of this, BPM and SOA are often conflated, leading to frustration among business professionals who feel as if both disciplines are too technical to bother with.

This is why we wrote a recent article about “What Comes First  – BPM or SOA,” as well as the differences between the two. But even if you now find yourself more comfortable with the differences and relationship between BPM and SOA, there is now a third acronym that you may have to concern yourself with: ECM.

Enterprise Content Management, or ECM, should not be a completely foreign idea, since “content management” has become a rather ubquitous keyword in the world of business. PArticularly if you’ve worked on any kind of online business solution or website, you know that every web solution operates on top of a “Content Management System,” or CMS. For those of us who are less technically inclined, it may have come as a shock that such a complex, robust solution to manage content must always exist underneath ever web solution — from big eCommerce websites to simple blogs like this one.

ECM, however, is more wide ranging than just talking about a CMS.

ECM was first defined by The Association for Information and Image Management (AIIM) International back in 2000. Its original scope was limited mainly to the process of converting paper-based content to digital, and even today, ECM retains that sense. Over the years, however, ECM has expanded to include more than just this limited process. For example, in 2005, AIIM’s official standard from ECM was the following: “Enterprise content management is the technologies used to Capture, Manage, Store, Preserve, and Deliver content and documents related to organizational processes.”

By 2010, however, AIIM had expended the scope of ECM to be more of an overarching discipline: “Enterprise Content Management (ECM) is the strategies, methods and tools used to capture, manage, store, preserve, and deliver content and documents related to organizational processes. ECM covers the management of information within the entire scope of an enterprise whether that information is in the form of a paper document, an electronic file, a database print stream, or even an email.”

So, if we are to see ECM both a strategy and method, how do we reconcile these with BPM? BPM, after all should be sees as the “first mover” in streamlining and optimising a business, with SOA as the technical arm of the process. But if ECM lives up to the above definition, doesn’t it threaten to trip over both BPM and SOA?

Similar to SOA, ECM should not be the driving force behind business optimisation. It very well may be that moving from paper to digital for your content management constitutes the primary focus on your BPM project. However, ECM should be a subsidiary of the SOA plan for whatever you are looking to achieve in BPM. Essentially, ECM applications are delivered in three ways: on-premise software (installed on the organization’s own network), Software as a Service (SaaS) (web access to information that is stored on the software manufacturer’s system), or a hybrid solution composed of both on-premise and SaaS components. In this way, implementing and managing ECM is the domain of IT.

If your organisation sees the migration from paper to digital as the crux of your BPM solution, think again: simply seeing the process as “paper to digital” fails to take into account the wide, sweeping changes that a new CMS will bring with it. It is important to build an overarching business process around ECM implementations that will take into account how to access and work with new content that has now been digitised.

What Comes First — SOA Or BPM?

Like the famous “chicken or the egg” question, many in business wonder what drives what when it comes to business integration and optimisation. Read how sorting out which comes first — SOA or BPM — is critical to the success of both practices making a difference for your company’s bottom line.

If you search around the internet for information and best practices regarding SOA and BPM, you’ll find that both practices seem to get grouped together. Often times, they are even grouped together as one package, with those new to business optimisation assuming that the terms are interchangeable. This, however, is not the case, as we have outlined in our previous article, “What Are The Differences Between BPM and SOA?”

What’s important to remember is that the process of building Service Oriented Architecture is an IT-oriented process, and part of the bigger BPM picture. It is, very simply, a technological means to an end. Business processes, after all, have for the majority of modern human civilization been hashed out and implemented without the use of information technology. It is only very recently that we consider BPM to be inextricably linked with computing and IT data sharing.

In this way, BPM not only comes first, but also comes last in the implementation process as well: SOA is essentially sandwiched in between, and becomes the robust realisation of what has been theoretically mapped out in the BPM planning stages. In order for SOA to be effective, the BPM starting point should be governed and conceived of by the business management component of an organisation, with early consultation from a CIO or IT staff as a “reality check” along the way. This way, unrealistic process concepts are not foisted on the SOA implementor, but at the same time, the vision for BPM is kept within the domain of business managers and not IT managers.

However, BPM/SOA Projects quite often go wrong because of the disconnection between business and IT at many levels, as well as a tendency to see both BPM and SOA as interchangeable disciplines that are both the domain of IT. A lack of business understanding on the part of the early BPM team, together with a lack of effective communication and poor design governance can lead to a “cart before the horse” conundrum that results in a major breakdown of the process.

Off-shoring can particularly complicate the matter, especially if the off-shore provider is given too much lattitude to design business processes without a native understanding of your company’s organisation and issues.

to conclude, an efficient BPM project should begin with the business stakeholders, and in turn let their goals and processes drive the IT side of SOA implementation. By allowing BPM to be the thinking and SOA to be the doing, companies can avoid the pitfalls of confusing the two.

Thanks for reading our article! Did you know that Integrella is one of the leading UK SOA consultants and providers? Be sure to visit our website on more information for how we can assist in both your BPM and SOA projects.

Integrella Is Recruiting!

It’s always a good thing to be able to announce that you’re recruiting. But just as the world of SOA,BPM, Business Integration, and Middleware continue to expand, so too are Integrella! We know that many IT professionals in our sector frequent this portal, so we’re hoping that you will reach out to us if any of these positions suit you, and that you live in the UK/are able to work in London.

We have three new, exciting positions available at Integrella. Click below to see them all: Read more…

Tackling Massive Business Process Reviews

For many companies, the most daunting and cumbersome aspect of Business Process Management (BPM) is simply conducting a sound, effective business process review, in order to determine what is working and what can be improved. It’s easy for a board of directors or executives to sit in a meeting and proclaim, “let’s streamline operations and business processes and save some money,” but it’s another thing to focus on the right areas that need fine-tuning.

This is especially true with mid- to -large size businesses with multiple complex departments that share business processes.

If you are a business professional for a company and have been handed the responsibility of delivering a bullet-proof business process review that has the chance to live up to its own expectations, you might feel somewhat overwhelmed by the process — even before you’ve begun. Here are a few guiding principles for delivering a business process review that bears out serious improvements and savings:

Style Points

When you’re perusing a business process, it necessarily involves pouring over flow charts and data. That’s the tangible part of the process that deserves its own directives. But there are also several x-factors to business process reviews that are worth noting, since your findings may very well reorient someone else’s operational creation that they may or may not be ready to mothball. And this sensitive spot can be compounded if an entire cadre of executives feel the same way.

Consider for a moment some of these points:

• Onboard an executive member from the get-go: having the sponsorship or advocacy of a decision maker can help lobby for a business process review’s findings, or give you a heads-up on an approach that will never fly.
• Ascertain how far you can go: the best business process rollouts are incremental, starting small, proving results, and then arguing for wider-ranging improvements. Conceive your proposal in this way to give decision makers the opportunity to sign on to something that seems reasonable.
• Include new ideas from new team members: choosing junior members of your team to conduct a business process review can lead to an “inbred” way of looking at operations, all of which could lead to a limited or conservative conclusion. This is why outsourcing your business process review can be a major advantage, as it puts the process into the hands of a team who has no vested interest or ego invested in the status quo — all they want is to suggest BPM changes that will bear quick results — which will in turn benefit their firm.

Practical Practices

Making sure you manage expectations and egos isn’t all you need to worry about — you also have to have a game plan for how to analyze and parse massive business processes. Here are a few key points that can make a world of difference:

• Identify “pain points,” workarounds, and exceptions early on in the process
• Utilize a process quality check list (e.g. a task is more efficient when performed earlier or later, which workarounds exceptions are candidates to be integrated and performed within the happy flow, …). Then, use this best practice process as a catalyzer for a gap-analysis discussion focused on domains but always inviting participants of neighbour domains to advance on transversal topics.
• Prioritize consideration of improving customer-centric processes in your review: there are bound to processes that are are largely back-end or proprietary that could be a pet focus for the executive team. But the goal of a successful business process review is to present a plan that has the best chance of delivering measurable results. Internally driven processes (e.g. audit, employee satisfaction) will not demonstrate the value of BPM like process that intersect with sales, customer service, order fulfillment, and other revenue-generating aspects of your company.

In addition, you should also read our older post: “Three Crucial Best Practices for the CIO’s BPM Pitch,” which fits into this discussion quite nicely as well, even if you are not a CIO.

Thanks for reading our article! If you’re looking to do a business process review and make major changes to operations using BPM, Integrella can help. Read more about it on our website.

Managed Service, Middleware Bridge Data Sharing Gaps For NHS and Educational Organisations

Public sector and data-heavy institutions such as NHS and educational organisations suffer from limitations in data sharing and tech support that can greatly lower productivity and customer service levels. Fortunately, managed services and middleware solutions are helping to bridge data sharing gaps and make for a more streamlined solution.

During the advent of the digital age in the public sector, it was assumed that robust computer systems and databases alone would solve the buerocratic nightmare of organising and tracking data using traditional paper filing methods. While there is no doubt that the modern database has done wonders for making data more quickly accessible, new demands brought on the ever-changing nature of governmental and organisational models have made even the use of databases and content management systems untenable for institutions associated with education and NHS.

In short, organisations such as these cannot readily share digital information — within their own disparate systems, or with the systems of cooperating institutions.

It is for this reason that the demand for managed services and customized middleware solutions is on the rise in the public sector in the U.K., with more and NHS and education organisations seeking out provate sector specialists who can wrangle disparate data systems and improve sharing and accessibility across a wide range of participating entities.

A Common Language For Disparate Systems

While organisations often seek to implement data systems uniformly, often included in a suite of services, over the years, new systems get added that do not necessaily integrate with older legacy systems. Often times, the less flexible legacy systems are the stewards of copious amounts of data that has to be effectively shuttled into new systems that are unable to parse old systems’ structure and presentation. With public sector institutions such as the NHS or education, an area of particular strain often exists between procurement systems (PECOS) and back-end Finance systems.

As mentioned in the intro of this article, the new Internet-based Provider Enrollment, Chain and Ownership Systems are an obvious improvement over traditional paper-based processes. But to integrate these new PECOS systems with back-end finance take a Managed Service solution that can bring this technological gap, while ensuring that the new middleware solution conforms with all data integration requirements. Public sector IT departments are often at a loss on how to achieve these objective on their own, which is where private sector middleware experts come in.

By offering hands-on Managed Service for the implementation of middleware, as well as ongoing support and maintenance of these new systems, the benefits of solutions like Internet-based PECOS can be fully realised for public sector organisations.

Cloud-Based Integration for the Public Sector

Cloud storage and computing is clearly the future — and the future has arrived. More and more companies are using the cloud to store vast quantities of data in data centers that make it easily accessible, web-based solutions are benefitting from cloud-based Content Delivery Networks (CDNs), and even consumers are benefitting from Apple’s iCloud for storing their videos, photos, music, and other content. As usual, however, the public sector is tending to lag behind in adopting cloud-based solutions for its own data storage and integration.

Significant opportunities to improve public sector sharing of data have been identified, though. Through centralisation, consolidation, and a move to a Cloud based infrastructure, organisations in the NHS or education can substantially reduce the cost of supporting integration hubs, while at the same time reduce  carbon footprint and provide an all-around better service to its customers sectors, leading to upwards of a 50% reduction in the number of support calls and resolution times.

There’s no doubt that, for a number of tangible and intangible reasons, the public sector often lags behind the private sector in onboarding new technologies. Fortunately, however, the public sector is beginning to reach out to private sector integration specialists in a bid to bring the same level of service and reliability to critical services such as healthcare and education.

Thanks for reading our article! Did you know that Integrella is a leading provider of managed integration and middleware services to the http://integrella.com/expertise/industries/government-defence-sector/#mce_temp_url#in the U.K.? Be sure to take a look at our website and see what we can offer your organisation.