As part of our mission to architect business agility for the enterprise, Intellyx has been interviewing vendors in support of our upcoming Agile Architecture Vendor Landscape report. The goal of this report is to review a select number of vendors and service providers across the IT landscape, scoring them on our Agile Architecture enablement criteria. The report will be free for download, and will help enterprise professionals understand what technologies and services are available on the market today that support the Bloomberg Agile Architecture™ Technique.
However, as it takes months to prepare such a report, and the information we’re gathering is useful today, we decided to publish a blog specifically to report on the vendors we have been interviewing. These blog posts are purely our opinion, and while each vendor we cover is welcome to fact check the post, Intellyx retains final editorial control. In addition, in keeping with our code of ethics, whether Intellyx has a business relationship with the vendor in question will be noted at the bottom of each post.
For the inaugural issue of the new BrainBlog, we have selected Be Informed. Be Informed is a Netherlands-based vendor who positions themselves in the Business Process Platform/Dynamic Case Management markets. They were founded in 2006, and have customers across Europe and the United States.
The reason we selected Be Informed is because they are the first vendor we have interviewed that rises to the challenge we set out in our first Cortex newsletter, Raising the Bar for Agile Architecture. In that article we delineated four central patterns of Agile Architecture: dynamic coupling, dynamic schemas, extreme late binding, and dynamic constraint satisfaction. Be Informed’s model-driven approach to creating dynamic applications provides these dynamic capabilities that lead us to characterize the Be Informed offering as a Business Agility Platform.
The secret to supporting this level of dynamism is to add an additional layer of abstraction, as we explained in the subsequent Cortex newsletter. This dynamic level depends upon abstract models that the underlying platform must be able to render into abstracted implementations (APIs, data schemas, etc.) at run time. Be Informed’s models support this capability, as the Be Informed platform directly executes the abstract models that represent the applications customers build on the platform.
Be Informed succinctly illustrates the power of this extra level of abstraction in their analogy to a SatNav system. When you follow the instructions in your car, your navigation system blithely leads you to your destination. Yet, should you deviate, it automatically recalculates (with a retort that always seems to sound a bit snippy) and then displays the new recommended route to your destination. Be Informed works the same way with a broad range of business processes — only thankfully without the snippiness.
The SatNav analogy illustrates two important characteristics: goal orientation and dynamic behavior. If an enterprise customer is using Be Informed to automate a business process, they need not focus on the specific ordering of individual steps as a traditional Business Process Management (BPM) tool might do. Rather, the customer need only express the goal of the process and describe the overall constraints that guide the application to the goal. As a result, the actual sequence of steps may vary from one moment to the next, and should conditions change during the course of a particular instance of a process, the platform will automatically recalculate the path toward the goal.
The Intellyx Take
People might argue that a tool like Be Informed’s platform isn’t really a BPM tool at all, as dynamically reconfigurable, goal-oriented workflows don’t have the repeatability normally expected from a business process. For this reason, Be Informed may be a better fit for the Dynamic Case Management (also called Adaptive Case Management) market, as case management requires a level of diversity and unpredictability that differentiates it from traditional BPM.
From the Intellyx perspective, such categorization may be necessary, but is inherently shortsighted. Gartner and Forrester divide up the IT market as they see fit, often at the behest of their larger customers, who want to make sure their products find their way to desirable Magic Quadrants or Waves. Smaller, more innovative players like Be Informed are left trying to shoehorn themselves into markets that end up underselling their capabilities.
When Intellyx suggests that “Business Agility Platform” may be a better categorization for a platform like Be Informed’s, we aren’t defining a market category, as we not only realize that we’re too small to have the market influence of the Gartners and Forresters of the world, but more importantly, we understand that no analyst firm, no matter how insightful, can define a market category. Only markets themselves – that is, customers with real money to spend – can do that.
At the time of writing Intellyx has no business relationship with Be Informed.
I think the next challenge for Be Informed will be to improve on the repeatability part, in completing on agility