Monthly Archives: November 2017

Architecture, Presales, Solution Architecture

What do Presales Consultants / Solution Architects do ? – Part 1

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All software projects and software product development goes through a cycle whether in AGILE / WATERFALL / ITERATIVE / HYBRID AGILE / DEVOPS / etc. where requirements are discussed, finalized or atleast finalized at a high level with prospects / customers – internal or external, post which project Statement of Work is created / signed or product backlog is created, agreed and work on software / product development starts.

Presales Consultants OR Solution Architects typically work on below items:

  • Responding to Request for Proposals / Request for Information / Request for Quote by building proposals which cater to various sections like compliance, terms and conditions, pricing, milestones, requirements, architecture, etc.
  • Finding the fitment of the prospect’s work in terms of organizational / technology / domain / process / quality / etc. with company and providing input for continuing the work of the prospect or not
  • Finalize or participate in high level solution and architecture design
  • Take decisions or participate in the same for areas like open source vs. proprietary or mixed
  • Conduct demos of earlier projects done / products built / solutions
  • Build pricing models for the project and milestones
  • Estimate or participate in estimation discussions
  • Conduct user / customer interviews as a business analyst or tester
  • Build proof of concepts / technology or functional demostrators
  • Participate in consulting assignments as a facilitator for architects and / or build the high level direction of the assignment or solution
  • Participate in or present the solutions / products to clients
  • Stay updated with trends in technology / domain, news, happenings in IT industry and overall in the organization which they represent so as to right fit the solution to the customer’s needs based on what’s available and possible
  • Build case studies, proposal and estimation repository, create white papers / presentations, processes for responding to client requests, list of standard questionnaires and their answers, etc.
  • Understand and study competitors, document the same
  • Build or participate in building best practices across technology, domain, process and quality
  • Create statement of work, proposals, quotes, approach documents, presentations, minutes of meetings and other artifacts that act as base documents for a sales discussion from back-end sales support side
  • Provide inputs to sales, marketing, delivery, testing, finance, HR, etc. and others as required based on the trends and customer knowledge that they acquire from industry / customer interactions
  • Hand over signed contracts and statement of works to the software delivery team via a hand over to start development or activities required before that and transfer understanding of customer expectations
  • Monitor the project along with project manager at high level for cost, architecture, technology, domain and duration, then participate in testing to ensure that product or project is on right track

Above was Part – 1 on details of what a Presales Consultant or a Solution Architect does. Moving forward I will post more details on the whole Presales and Solutioning life cycle

Enterprise Content Management

BPM (Business Process Management) and trends

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Business process management from 1990s / 2000s in simplest terms is a set of activities (automated or manual) with breaks for events and interactions with external systems / human beings along with notifications / rules / filters / etc. Traditional BPM / Workflows included manual and automated tasks, integrations (mainly offline or asynchronous), notifications, auto-escalations, interactions with human beings.

Come to 2017 and we have plethora of new technologies / products in the ecosystem which we can use along with BPM – some are already in use and some will evolve with time.

  1. Real time analytics integration with social media and other areas
  2. IoT integration
  3. Automation, Machine Learning & Artificial intelligence
  4. Collaboration
  5. Omni channel
  6. Cloud
  7. Entity modelling and Decision model & Notation instead of BPMN
  8. Chatbots as entry points
  9. Low code business process management platform
  • Real time analytics – With all of the social media APIs in the market like Twitter / Facebook and so on we can integrate them with BPM as an entry point based on for example for many of the tasks or in other activities in integration. A positive or negative review with specific keywords can for instance trigger a specific part of or the start of workflow. Something similar was done by a bank in India recently where they had twitter based banking
  • Internet of Things has a lot of intelligence built into them from beacons, electronics kits, sensors, biometrics and so on. They could act as augmentation to the normal input provided by other systems and BPM users / admins. For instance based on a specific temperature threshold emergency systems could be activated and series of various fire mitigation steps could be activated
  • Robotic process automation, machine learning and AI have the capability to automate many of the steps of BPM / Workflows. They could for instance automate the under-writing of various insurance policies based on earlier inputs and rules
  • Collaboration and omni channel are buzz words today in marketing and horizontal portals. BPM can potentially now work with multiple channels like smartphones, APPs, SMS, calls, social media, etc. driving more productivity
  • Many companies now offer softwares in cloud as SAAS and workflows too for instance can be hosted in say AWS to connect anywhere, anytime and in multiple ways over internet
  • Entity modelling and Decision model & Notation are two new ways of modelling your workflows and business processes. They are closer to business and non technical users can use them for modelling the processes
  • Chatbots which use Natural language processing to create chats between humans and backend systems could be another potential entry activity for workflows and BPM
  • Lastly low code platforms are getting more traction as we move into world of automation, artificial intelligence and machine learning. With decision model & notation and entity based modelling we are already moving in direction of low code platforms
Architecture, Enterprise Content Management

Blockchain for ECM and Digital Assets

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What is ECM ?

Enterprise Content Management is a repository of documents with workflow, scanning, digital rights management, integrations, metadata, web content management and portals weaved around it

What is BlockChain ?

Database mainly used as distributed ledger which does not allow modifications of earlier stored ‘Blocks’ in it and secured by cryptography in a way where earlier blocks’ signature is stored on the next instance resulting in immutability. If any of the earlier blocks are modified it results in a corruption of network majority

What can we do when we merge BlockChain with ECM ?

We have immutable strings in Java, we have immutable objects in programming. But to maintain immutability in Enterprise Content Management, Document Management and Digital Assets we go upto great lengths to have hashing, signatures, complex repository engines, MD5s and so on.

One thing that could help us is BlockChain. People have already started speaking of building custom ECM engines using open source products from NoSQL and Portal domain. If we add a BlockChain database to this mix, we get a serious contender for a new type of ECM repository – one that does not need complex repository logic or probably simplifies it.

Use cases:

  1. ECM – We can take a NoSQL database, Blockchain and a horizontal portal. Portal works for the workflow, presentation, rules, etc. NoSQL for the metadata and BlockChain for integrity of the repository assets like documents.
  2. Digital assets repository – All the signatures of the various repository assets in an enterprise could be stored in the BlockChain which can verify assets’ integrity just like what MD5 does

Its worth exploring. BlockChain can be so much more than just transactions’ integrity management.