centralization vs. fragmentation

[Dart, Jocelyn]

Hi Mark,
I'm glad I'm not the only one who feels that history is repeating itself.
 
*#@&! Irritating isn't it?
 
I'm amazed at how many people seem to forget all the hard-learned lessons of
the past
as soon as the phrase "e-commerce" comes up.  Funnily enough, little things
like project
planning and ROI, for instance, do still apply.
 
Very VERY frustrating to see people try to implement quick and dirty
e-commerce
solutions which have a snazzy facade but little or no thought has been given
to how
the business process is going to work behind all of this. End result - loss
of face and
loss of user buy-in as it becomes evident that the process is missing behind
the facade.
 
Too much "got to be on the 'net" panic out there.  Certainly we have to move
quickly but
that's no excuse for not thinking through the business process.  It doesn't
matter what or
how many e-commerce applications you put out on your website - if the
process doesn't work
it's going to become evident to your users very quickly.  If anything
e-commerce requires
greater attention to slick streamlined business processes with attentive
problem resolution
- e-commerce users expect speed, don't have a lot of patience and have no
reason to be loyal
to a site that gives them grief.
 
At least these days we have workflow - and it's relatively straight forward
to hook it
behind your e-commerce application.  My two favourite methods at the moment
would be
1) Using the ITS and the generated WWW transactions to kick of the workflow
or execute the workitem
2) Have the e-commerce application call an RFC to raise the event
 
Just saw webflow at the Las Vegas TechEd - looks promising although there
are still some
security issues to be resolved in more depth.  Bad news is you need R/3 4.6C
to run it.
I guess in the meantime we can simulate cross-corporation flows by adding
steps to
trigger RFC calls or XML doc sends to other systems.
 
The other good news is that there are more and more workflow solutions
coming out of Walldorf
- nearly all the new e-commerce solutions involve well-defined
pre-configured workflows at some point.
Lots more samples and examples for us to build on.  Also the condition
editor which lets you
basically do simple check function modules without programming is useful.
 
Would recommend people also have a look at the new workflow miniapp which
sucks the workitems from
multiple systems into the one web inbox - very interesting!
 
Regards, Jocelyn.
 
-----Original Message-----
From: Mark Huffman [mailto:m.r.huffman at worldnet.att.net]
Sent: Tuesday, 13 June 2000 2:08 PM
To: SAP-WUG at MITVMA.MIT.EDU
Subject: centralization vs. fragmentation
 
 
I'm not claiming any great insight here, but over a quiet beer this past
weekend, was reflecting on the state of the IT industry and in
particular some of the large organizations that I consult with.
 
For those of us who were in IT before SAP R/3, the eighties and early
nienties was a time of decentralization, with every department wanting
their own database, standalone expert systems etc.
 
Then SAP came along with the central database repository concept - I
remember when I took my first course, the teacher was actually kind of
sheepish about discussing the architecture as it sounded so mainframish.
 
For awhile that architecture swept all before it and all sorts of
systems died only to have their data sucked into some module of SAP. For
workflow the name of the biggest game was implementing cross-module
processes within SAP.
 
But now it seems that the centralization tide has crested and we are
back to decentralization or even fragmentation. Every deparment wants
their own customer database and business rule set (deja vu?) with the
Internet spinning off all sorts of CRM/SCP systems and other acronyms.
 
Now the SAP teams are being accused of reacting too slowly to change
requests and for workflow the biggest game apparently is webflow or for
survival at least backending to a hot new Internet project that just got
budget.
 
Any comments? Would be nice to get a good systems debate going again
rather than just answering the same old questions from consultants who
can't be bothered calling up their online help.