White Paper - Simplification using Entity oriented architecture and Micro-Workflows

In a very simplistic terms, every business is essentially a permutations of exchange of product or services with customers. Underpinning those exchanges, are IT Systems and business processes either executing or supporting the interactions. For large enterprises, there are silos created over time which results in pockets of systems and processes that may be efficient in their own right but become areas of bottleneck for the overall enterprise.

To fix this problem and more importantly to prevent this from occurring, it's a well-known imperative to use what Jay Forrester calls Systems thinking. However, with organisations structurally divided in silos and funding or priorities driven by respective short term targets, it's difficult to implement in earnest. 

This paper discusses a technique of architecture that takes that a successful programming methodology of Object oriented programming and tries to influence architecture paradigm. The OOPS technique has been extremely helpful in abstracting and encapsulating complexities of targeted functions allowing large programs to be created by plug and play

Entity and Workflow

Most large enterprises are littered with 3 kinds of systems - Customer facing systems, Workflows & integrations and System of records - that supports the core business. All other systems are utilities for the staff which in turn can be considered from a viewpoint of staff as the customer of internal product or services.

A Telecom or a Financial institution will have their public website or app taking inputs from customer and providing information; a (set of) BPM system helps execute various Actions that results in update of information in various Systems of records like customer information, customer accounts and customer products systems. 

For any business,

• System of records typically hold the Entities that are critical to the business for instance - Customer, Suppliers, Merchants and their relationships to the business or with each other.
• The Workflow and integrations systems merely execute Actions on those entities for instance - creation of a new account against a customer, adding a new service for the customer etc.
• The front-line systems facilitates the interaction with the entities that trigger the actions. In doing so, they help visualise various entities of customer interests and prompts customer to trigger available actions.  

Whilst in the real world, there will be multiple systems supporting these 3 paradigms and not all will be fully automated. There will be human processes bridging the gaps in this end to end flow. However, thinking about your systems in this way would always keep the perspective of what role a particular system plays in the overall business. 

This will help in gradually simplifying the enterprise architecture by giving anchor point of decision making in designing of the systems or process. For example, if your organisation have old back-office systems that help them to their task e.g view and generate duplicate statements, then it may be tempting for departments to invest in modernising the system to perform their task better. However, having a view of what role the system plays for the overall business entities may help to decide on prioritising investment in getting rid of the system and automate the whole instead. If at all a decision is taken to still invest on the system, it could be recorded a debt in a larger scheme of things. 

In short,

Make sure your ladder is leaning against right wall

Business workflow

Workflows are a sequence of activities or tasks that are done to achieve an outcome. For example crediting a customer Account, debiting a suspense account, sending a text to the customer are example of sequence of action to Write off a transaction of an account holder. Another example is - taking details from customer, creating a 4G Account, sending notification to customer and triggering a OSS provisioning - represents a telecom account provisioning workflow. 

Workflows string together activities and tasks to create an atomic action that creates a business entity or changes state of a business entity without causing inconsistencies. Whilst individual activities can cause integrity issues, a set of activities executed in a particular order does not. For example, crediting an Account, sending notification to customer or getting details form customer are all meaningless activities on their own for the business but combining them with other logical activities provides an atomic outcome like a new home loan, a Write off or a new activated 4G service. 

There are various tools in the market called BPM tools like Pega, iBPM, Appian etc that help automate the execution either by allowing staff to execute activities in sequence or automatically executing tasks by connecting System or Records or automation. Robotics tools like BluePrism can also string together activities automatically by mimicking human actions on various systems. Robotics is often used as tactical fast track method to automate when workflow automation is costly or time consuming. 

Nevertheless, business workflow are important sequence of activities or tasks that results in a business action on an entity. Identifying your key Actions on your key business entities is important to maintain a perspective when designing or creating solutions. Many enterprises purchase tools and end up automatic every process that exists which is not always a good thing. Automating an action that shouldn’t exist at the first place is a bad decision and having an overall perspective of actions that are core to the business helps identify them by anchoring the actions on entities. 

Business workflows are akin to Methods and Entities are akin to object of an Object oriented programming

 Therefore, when thinking of business process automation always think of what is the entity involved and what change of state this workflow applies on the entity. By linking your workflow to entities will often help being mindful out that current workflow is part of a bigger puzzle thus reinforcing systems thinking. It might also identify duplicate tools and workflow in the enterprise. 

More importantly, identification and leveraging re-usable workflows is the holy grail of plug and play architecture

Enterprise architecture is like a lasagne of services and not like a complex spaghetti of systems

Micro-workflows

You are semi-colon to my statements - Anonymous

As the name suggests micro workflows are actions that are relatively small sequence of activities or tasks on an entity. Whilst they result in a logical change of state of the entity or a logical outcome but they may not be a complete action but part of an overall action. For examples are sending notification to customer, giving money to customer - are perfectly logical actions but they are not any service or a complete business transaction with the customer in their own right. 

These micro-workflow, however are often building blocks of the business actions that are important to the customer or a complete business transaction. 

Identifying various micro-workflows against the entities helps in designing and containerising them as modular and independent process. These modular workflows can then be re-used in many large business transactions or customer servicing process. Apart from a clear benefit of re-usability, micro workflow design paradigm also helps in

• Abstracting technicalities of mundane activities
• Simplifies the overall business workflow
• Helps focus on solving efficiency issues on various pockets
• Help prioritise investments on the basis of amount of reuse of the micro workflows 

For example, for a telecom service provider, Customer identification is an example of mini workflow against a customer or prospect. Many enterprises have semi-automatons in place to execute this or it could be completely manual. Back in the day, customer IDV was considered a One-Off and was not automated or build as part of On boarding or prospecting process. Overtime, due to anti-terrorism regulations etc a Re-IDV and fast IDV have become a mandate and therefore this mini-workflow is now injected into many other business workflow and hence often a bottleneck. As an architect or designer, investing on efficiency of IDV workflow provider significant benefit to efficiency of all other workflows. 

Therefore, always keep an open eye for micro-services design and implement them as separate actions. 

Micro workflows are like private methods in an object oriented programming, they can't be independently called from outside but are extremely important for many public methods to get the job done

Role of standards

Back in the days, cargo from one country to another were loaded into ships in bags and boxes of different sizes and as the industry grew, the loading/unloading in ports became significant bottleneck. The problem was solved by Keith Tantlinger by standardising the dimensions of shipping container. This revolutionised the global operations and improved efficiency of international trade many folds. 

Importance of standards cannot be overstated especially in large enterprises where there are multiple silos and standards would help cut through the silos. 

In context of architecture, standards shall be applied to all areas where there is interaction between systems , entities or parties. This includes but not limited to

• UI standard for Staff screen and customer screen
• Standards of Real time integrations e.g REST-API or SOAP
• Standards for monitoring , authentication and logging 

Standards also helps in inter-interoperability of tools when undergoing gradual transformation. For example, if you are changing your workflow tool or trialling new tool , standardisation would help in seamlessly plugging in new toolkit on target area without causing significant disruptions. 

For workflows too, picking industry standards often helps in interoperability like ITIL for your IT workflows, eTOM for your telecom workflows and create tailored standards pre-satisfying your industry's regulatory obligations. 

Standardise the mundane to preserve creativity on the important

Human vs STP

Discussion on process or workflow is incomplete without touching upon Straight through processing (STP) and role of human assisted workflows. Often STP(s) are sensitive because they often associated with loss of jobs. Also, STP aren't always possible if your industry is highly regulated and cost of error is significant. 

If we anchor our workflows as Actions against business entities, then workflow can be viewed as assorted human activities and automated tasks. The basic rule of automation is 100% objective clarity on the steps. If there is any subjectivity then a human being activity can be used (often called Knowledge worker). 

As a designer or architect of workflows, you can anchor the subjectivity in form of Human Approvals because often times decision is the most subjective thing. Be mindful though of the placement of these Human steps as they may impede the flow if placed too frequently. 

With this principle, you can design a human assisted workflow even for objective workflow if constrained by tools, workforce sensitivity or funding but always record the decision in Enterprise decision log so that it can be picked up for automation when the situation changes. 

One of the most important aspect of Human assisted activities even in STP is exception handing. Often recovering from unknown situation in a workflow requires subjective evaluations, therefore consider Human exception handling in business critical STP.

Automate the IQ and hire for EQ

To conclude, I would like to emphasise on the notion that when thing are complicated it means something is wrong. IT systems are no different and this paper tries to help in simplification approach by scaling the benefits of abstraction and encapsulation to an otherwise complex technology ecosystem.