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Ask A Pro:
Axway CTO Dave Bennett on Tomorrow's Trends, Part 1
Axway Today recently caught up with Dave Bennett to review and explore a few of the many exciting concepts discussed at Axway Connections 2009 in Paris and Phoenix this past October.
AT: At Axway Connections 2009, you headed up a panel featuring Axway's Taher Elgamal, Bernard Debauche and, in the U.S., Joe Fisher, and you speculated on the future of cloud computing, governance, risk management, compliance and other issues. What do you make of their predictions?
DB: Their predictions map closely to the innovation concepts discussed in the following keynote presentation. Innovation typically involves convergence and simplification, and cloud services are a perfect example of this. Taher started out talking about policy enforcement, because he's a security guy and really focused on top-down policy. Bernard focused on visibility and believed that if you didn't have visibility, you could never drive policy or change policy, and you could never really get compliant without visibility and analytics. Joe followed up with secure communications and talked about how that's the base before governance and compliance can even exist. I said that, for governance, it was a circular process that covers all of those elements—policy, policy enforcement and visibility. Everybody was right, I think—these are all complementary viewpoints.
Every business process involves people, and that's where complexity comes in—the challenge of managing the system-to-system flow efficiently while handling those ad hoc communications that are part of any business interaction or any business process.
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You can have a circular approach of constantly complying with regulatory issues and dealing with risk in a new way and with a simplified single set of tools. If you listened to our panel predictions, and then listened to our keynote presentation around innovation and what innovation is, you'd get a sense of why we tied these two presentations together. Axway's strategy is aligned with what visionaries like author Tom Koulopoulos see leaders doing: focusing on convergence simplification and those areas that we talked about—governance, risk, the economy, security, community and simplification. Those areas represent the core of a Business Interaction Network. It goes beyond simple transactions to managing the complexity of constantly changing business interactions across a company's ecosystem. So, you might ask, what is the difference between a business transaction and a business interaction? Placing an order, receiving an order acknowledgment, and placing an invoice—that's a business transaction. That's a system-to-system transaction. When you add a human element to that, that system-to-system transaction flow is broken. Every business process involves people, and that's where complexity comes in—the challenge of managing the system-to-system flow efficiently while handling those ad hoc communications that are part of any business interaction or any business process. Governance plays an important part in all of this, because while all of this is going on, there are on one side regulatory and auditing pressures and, on the other side, the need to standardize and innovate. You need the governance to reduce the risks around all of that. I challenge Axway's "rock stars"—our brightest innovators on staff—to look at unplanned processes and ask themselves, "How do we extend the offering that we announced at Connections, File Transfer Direct, to support more of these unplanned processes so we can tie the business interactions together and converge them in a way that's never really been done?"
AT: How do you expect companies will benefit once those business interactions are tied together?
DB: It will be disruptive in a very positive way. When you start governing and monitoring and simplifying things, you find that—all of a sudden—your long-time traditional processes change. I've seen companies buy visibility for, let's say, measuring the performance of services they offer to their customers, and after awhile they end up changing some of their business processes on the back end. That is simply because when you get 360-degree views of your processes, end to end, and from start to finish, you realize what you need to do to enhance performance. You then end up optimizing your core business, driving bigger margins, improving inventory positions, and improving service-level agreements (SLAs) with your customers.
AT: You say this will be a disruptive technology. What was the most significant disruption in the last twenty or thirty years?
DB: The Internet. Now there was a technology innovation that became truly multipurpose. And anytime something becomes multipurpose, it changes the way people do things. It changes the way you do business, and new models are created. Internet technology stimulated our economy. While not on the same scale, the new innovation I'm talking about—tying these more unplanned processes to planned processes—will have the same sort of effect. It's going to be a real focus area for a lot of people. Like Tom Koulopoulos has written in his book, "The Innovation Zone," society has invested a lot in the transaction side, but very little in unplanned processes. That's the next ground to invest in, and it will drive our economy over the next few years.
AT: So it might be that, thirty years from now, when we look back on today...
DB: Right. We'll recognize that one of those inflection points that really changed the situation occurred when people started looking at innovation and unplanned processes. People in the future will say, "Wow, that was the real trigger that changed my business and started the growth of the economy." It may take another ten years. But technology typically drives those increments. And I think we're due for one.
If you have access to youtube.com, visit http://youtube.axway.com and see our Predictions Panel in action at Axway Connections 2009.
| | Dave Bennett is the CTO of Axway.
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