Recap: Putting the Information Framework to Work for You

Nearly every time John Wilmes and John Reilly get together for a webinar, not only do they deliver valuable insight and content, they spend substantial amounts of time fielding questions from the audience. Personally, I find the live Q&A to be one of the best parts of the webinars.

The webinar we hosted on the 21st, Putting the Information Framework (SID) to Work for You, was true to form. John Wilmes and John Reilly spent nearly 30 minutes after the webinar finished answering questions.

What I’ve noticed over the past several webinars is that the tenor of the questions are shifting.  We’re seeing a shift from educational/informational questions towards questions about actual implementation.  During last week's webinar we received several questions about designing enterprise information models, developing business cases, and even the existence of pro-forma RFI/RFPs.

The community is coming to the realization that managing and maintaining information exchange is clearly within the remit of integration—leave it unaddressed at your peril.  Your responses to the TM Forum webinar survey bears this out. For example, in response to the question “What percentage of your projects are spent on integrating data between your applications and services?” - 70% of you told us that dealing with data integration consumed more than 40% of the development effort. And dealing with data integration is not easy work. 

When we asked about the most difficult challenge, your top three responses were:

1. Keeping documentation up to date (19%)
2. Not enough resources to keep up with development (30%)
3. Managing change (43%)

These challenges are interrelated and what’s more interesting is that all three challenges can be directly addressed by the use of exchange modeling technology for data interoperability.  The inability to keep documentation up to date makes it difficult to manage change.  When changes comes in, your teams are forced to manually ascertain the impact and test everything to ensure success in production.  For the small selection of you who are starting from a green field addressing change will not be an issue... the first time. However, with every subsequent change caused by new developments, new requirements, new business initiatives... you will need the means to understand and manage the effects in your environment. If you don’t have that capability, you don’t have agility.

So given the resource constrained world, the choice is etiher: to continue to muddle along with an allocation of resources heavily skewed towards these maintenance tasks; or to raise the effectiveness of your teams in maintenance and use those savings to address more mission critical tasks. Perhaps more succinctly: do more with less by doing what you must do more efficiently.  

This is the conceptual basis on which we have created many successful business cases.  If you’d like to learn more, or if you would like assistance in justifying the need for exchange modeling technology and framework implementation, please do not hesitate to contact us.