The Inovis Blog

Understanding Business Communities

New choices, new partners and new complexity at the edge of the enterprise are not only making B2B more fun/interesting, but also creating new communities with new enablement challenges. More and more organizations are being required to exchange data with other companies – the growth in this volume is driven by the changing definition of a business community – previously YOU participated in other communities – today it’s about YOUR business community and YOUR business needs.

Once companies embrace the need to manage their Business Community more effectively through automation and process extensions they are often required to examine their B2B infrastructure and architecture to ensure success. To that end, Business Community Management (BCM) 2.0 is here!

BCM: Delivery Automation and Differentiation

Over time many businesses have developed an “accidental architecture” or architecture by initiative when it comes to B2B.  This is problem is exacerbated in the B2B world; the back office had several key revolutions which established common infrastructure “chunks” – ERP, WMS and EAI, which drive process automation and agility within the enterprise.  Until now, B2B hasn’t had the killer app, only the critical need which was often time boxed and customer driven – now suppliers are embracing strategic B2B deployments which better support competitive advantages required in a global marketplace.

Business Communities circa 2007 are about aligning your internal infrastructure and platforms to optimize your B2B activities.  The critical sea change is the deployment of service oriented architectures (SOA) which make enabling corporate via a single edge infrastructure a reality. SOA provides B2B platform providers the opportunity to leverage back office systems for they do best – automate internal private process and link, secure and manage public processes which are shared with suppliers, logistic providers and customers.

The continued investment in improving a company’s infrastructure is about achieving increased visibility and control within the IT infrastructure which is driving several key investment trends:

1. Eliminate Scripts – Many companies have 1000’s of scripts which drive point integration and file exchange – typically FTP.  A key driver to this trend is lack of repositories, re-usability and general inability to manage and operate legacy managed file transfer needs via uncategorized/invisible scripts.

2. Consolidation of Tools – Other time many departments, users and projects deployed a new technology due to timeline needs, familiarity or price points, but today compliance and service levels are making is an imperative to consolidate connectivity, business rules and exceptions for effective management.

3. Legacy Extensions -  Value continues to be provided via your legacy solutions. The continued operational value and production readiness of legacy applications, platforms and data formats is driving technology leaders to put web service wrappers around key functionality and systems which still are production viable.

4. New Markets – With increased extensions in supply chains and the global nature of business communities enabling more/new partners and community management strategies are required

These items are driving increased focus on B2B Gateways which effectively manage integration with legacy systems, integration infrastructures and exchanging community content inside and outside of the business. The killer app in B2B is delivering a killer strategy to rapidly enable new processes and partners within the context of needs of the business. This strategic reality for accelerating the value derived from your business community requires a strategic investment in your infrastructure which support the key items above and the implementation requirements for your community.

Building and Binding YOUR Community

Most organizations have invested significantly in their back-office infrastructures to ensure flexible integration, robust production control and rich analytics for key functional areas (Orders, Support, Sales process, Inventory, Capacity….). Now that they are extending the automation beyond the enterprise, additional flexibility is required that is currently not found in today’s back-office applications since previously internal processes are increasingly SHARED process with business partners. No longer do “most of need” solutions meet the community requirements – best of breed is the clear choice for driving community efficiencies.

The complexities of your business community’s connectivity requirements, data formats and business relationship specific implementation guidelines require a consolidated view of all the transactional information to minimize business interruptions and maintain a high quality of service for your key partners and customers in your growing business community.

Implementing a BCM strategy provides an opportunity to streamline these interactions and reduce operational complexity with increase control and capabilities not available in most of need solutions, such as back office applications or integration platforms which “do EDI or XML exchange”.   

The biggest leap in BCM 2.0 is that it’s not about a given documents data or the secure exchange of documents, but the context of the content you exchange with your partners in a secure exchange environment.