Business Mashups Functionality
Business Mashups are used to automate common business processes, from critical applications like nuclear corrective action procedures and satellite configurations, to simple business activities like invoice approvals and proposal generation. In order to build applications that can fit such a wide array of needs, you need a set of capabilities that enable innovation while maintaining the governance that is crucial in any critical application.
If you want to automate business processes across people and systems, here is a list of critical capabilities Serena Business Mashups offers.
Build Processes Simply and Intuitively
What it is:
A Business Mashup is a composite application that automates common business activities by coordinating people, processes, and data. Combining the pragmatism and speed of Web 2.0, the re-use and governance of Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), and the integration strengths of Business Process Management, Business Mashups allow tech-savvy business people to build their own applications—without any coding.
Business Mashups support:
- Team processes
- System orchestration (or system-to-system interactions) and
- User experience customization
Why it matters:
Every organization loses money in the wasted time and process inefficiencies associated with everyday business activities. Can you think of some small applications that would help drive new business or make your operations more effective? Don’t you wish there was a way you could build and deploy these applications quickly without spending money on costly IT resources?
That’s exactly the purpose of Business Mashups. They allow you to create automated processes, tie these processes in with multiple back-end or cloud-based systems while providing the unified experience we’ve all come to expect from web applications—all without writing code.
Start With A Pre-Built Mashup
What it is:
Organizations share similar practices: IT change protocols, sales operation processes, HR hiring procedures, and project management activities, for example. Business Mashups that solve a particular business problem are a great starting point for any organization.
Why it matters:
A Business Mashup that is based on best practices can help an organization quickly solve a specific business need. The ability to use an existing Business Mashup as a starting point, and either deploy it as-is, or modify it slightly, is critical in implementing a Business Mashup quickly and easily—you can start seeing productivity gains without having to build from scratch.
Complete Mashup Governance
What it is:
As organizations continue to innovate and build new applications and Mashups, it is important to maintain the governance required in many industries.
There are two areas of governance to consider with Business Mashups:
- Governance of the Mashups—as you have people building and deploying Mashups, it is important to control who can deploy Mashups. You also want to be able to track the version and deployment history of Mashups.
- Governance within the Mashups—since Mashups automate critical business activities, you need to provide full traceability and auditing of who did what and when they did it within every Mashup.
Why it matters:
- Governance of the Mashups—by controlling how Mashups are governed, you have visibility into your Mashup landscape, which is especially vital for Mashups that integrate with critical internal systems.
- Governance within the Mashups—using Mashups to report on the activities within a set of automated business processes, you can be sure to meet internal and external audit requirements like CMMI, Six Sigma, Sarbanes-Oxley, 21 CFR 11 (FDA), HIPAA and others.
Team Process Designer
What it is:
Team processes are central to the coordination of people and the activities in which they participate to get their jobs done. Organizations operate a lot like assembly lines: work is passed from person-to-person, from team-to-team. One of the key pieces of a Business Mashup is team process—the ability to automate the activities of people and the teams they work on as they carry out tasks. A team process designer enables a person to model what these activities look like, and define what people and teams are involved in the tasks in a drag-and-drop interface, without any coding.
Why it matters:
In order to build and deploy Business Mashups, you need to be able to incorporate team processes into your Mashups without having to involve technical resources or expensive BPM (Business Process Management) infrastructure and experts.
System Orchestration Designer
What it is:
A Business Mashup is a composite application that automates common business activities by coordinating people, process and data. System orchestrations allow you to augment existing team processes, or workflows, by adding system-to-system interactions on top of the workflow. Orchestrations integrate information from different applications and systems into a Business Mashup. These system orchestrations are system-to-system interactions. The integration of TestDirector data or information from Salesforce.com’s Case Management to an Issue Tracking application are examples of system orchestrations.
Why it matters:
By combining data from the system of record and synchronizing it with Business Mashups, you increase productivity across critical business activities: it means no long e-mail chains and no application jumping to double enter data. It also means that you’ve removed human error from the equation of incorporating data from legacy applications into the activities managed by automated Business Mashups.
Custom Forms Designer
What it is:
Custom usability. With a custom forms designer you have a tremendous set of capabilities that allows you to easily create and customize forms. A forms designer provides the ability to create an experience specific to the people who use your Mashups. A Mashup forms designer should be drag-and-drop simple, allowing for customized and accessible user interactions without requiring HTML or XHTML knowledge.
Why it matters:
When you create Mashups that are used across the organization, usability means greater adoption and little-to-no training. Being able to easily customize the experience for Mashup users mean they participate in an activity automated by a Mashup without even knowing they are “using a Mashup”.
Granular Role-based Privileges
What is it:
Business Mashups coordinate activities across teams and applications—these activities are associated with roles. Within these roles users have the ability to see and do only what they have access to.
Why it matters:
Role-based privileges are critical for maintaining governance. With the proper privileges, you ensure that the right people see the right information at the right time.
Extensible Data Model Definition
What it is:
As you build your custom applications and Mashups that automate your business processes, the ability to customize the data you collect and coordinate is critical. An extensible data model definition gives you the ability to create and manage the data types you want to use in all of your Business Mashups.
Why it matters:
This means that you can be sure you’re collecting the right information from the right people and applications. It also means that you don’t have to bend to anyone else’s terms for your information—you get to use the terms you want to fit your specific business needs (and don’t have to train end users on new terms that don’t make sense to them).
Comprehensive Mashup Deployment Control and Reporting
What is it:
Like traditional application development, it is important to understand how a platform supports full-fledged development processes including deployment, promotion and publishing. The ability to control deployment of Mashups means that an organization has full fidelity promotion of a Mashup and all related configuration data, called a snapshot, from one environment to another—including detailed audit histories of deployment activities.
Why it matters:
In order to innovate by building and deploying Business Mashups that automate business processes, IT requires governance. Best practices in software management advocate multiple environments for development, testing, staging and production where changes are propagated from one environment to another in an automated manner. Business Mashups provides the ability to deploy and promote Mashups across multiple environments—this capability includes detailed deployment histories so you can meet internal and external audit requirements.
Flexible Browser-based Reports
What is it:
Flexible report creation and management allows you and the other Mashup users and administrators to create both ad-hoc and regular reports that respect the privileges of the Mashup users. Business Mashups include out-of-the-box reports for common reporting metrics like time/state and find/fix data.
Why it matters:
As Business Mashups automate critical business activities, users can monitor the work being passed across teams and applications. This means that no one is blindsided by critical tasks that fell through the cracks, and your process best practices are automated, enforced and audited.
