ITV

Tag: BAM

  • Cyber-Skating on One Flat Earth

    Overnight, the earth became flat, metaphorically and in reality, too, as an ultra-sophisticated, digitally formatted, flat geographical platform, where business and corporate agendas in shapes of large digital cyber-warfare torpedoes skate at bullet speed. Precise navigation, correct targeting and direct hits took over.

    Now there are players and there are spectators. The players are either corporate elites or very smart solo entrepreneurs, the spectators are the regional end-users scattered all over the globe in their unique demographical structures.

    The new players flex their economic might and powers and the commercial reach of their global cyber-visibility and the uniqueness of their selling propositions under the banners of clear brand name identities — all designed to tickle the global end-user at large.

    The winners and losers of this flat-earth warfare are also being sorted out into either delete or send files. It is fast and very black and white. Like watching a hockey game on an old television.

    Entering the Game

    The entry to skate on this slippery digital platform is not expensive at all. All it requires is a deeper understanding of all the cutting edge rules of the cyber marketing game, a very sharp set of cyber-branding skills, tactical training of the entire frontline and a small team with real courage, knowledge and a winning attitude. Since marketing models of the old-fashioned, firm handshake with a fake smile, the lala-land branding circuses, and the bottomless hip-hop advertising of recent years are just dead, you’re better off hiring a coach from a top Canadian hockey team, or something like this.

    Just realign to skate today’s global cyber games.

    In my 1995 book, Sunrise, Day One, Year 2000, I discussed a short synopsis of phases in business communications of the last century and how they would bring all of us to new crossroads of digital and virtual societies by 2000. I have routinely talked about this flat earth and lectured extensively about the coming of a digitally formatted global platform. Wherever I went across the world, I have always pointed to this new reality.

    In a nutshell, corporations have two choices: become experts at this business model to skate freely around the globe of the future, or explore exit strategies to get out of the game.

    Tom Friedman, a brilliant writer, a great thinker and a globally recognized foreign affair columnist with The New York Times, explains in great detail the new realities and applications of this metaphorically flattened earth. His new book, Flat World, is a real endorsement to such ideas and forecasts, and I’m very glad to see the global sharing and practical applications of such thinking. I consider this book required reading for emerging young executives.

    Going for Gold

    The future is very bright for the speedy-e-commerce-mentality-thinkers, and equally so for the deal-makers and for the risk-takers. It is also very dark for the old mentality thinkers from the old economy and their old business models. The new Business Activity Management, or BAM, breaks all the molds.

    The new rules of BAM are based on advance predictability, cause and effect, interactive processing speed with a built-in logical and rational model of sophisticated computing. Once all put together, it provides a brand new set of tools to play the new games for new championships. Sharpen the skates!

    Building a Small Team

    Very big corporations have traditionally made very big mistakes. Small corporations too often also have made very big mistakes, but the resulting damage is very small. To spot a mistake in the making is a fine art. Therefore, it starts by building an award-winning skating team. This is very easy, provided you have a game plan and a coach, but it’s a nightmare if there are no rules, no agenda, no goal posts or no puck.

    As a starter, it’s best to eliminate the big IT layer — literally speaking, let most of the IT become the cyber-marketing enabler. Physically move them from the dark rooms to beside the CEO at the top floor of the ivory tower.

    Get the lawyers and fancy artsy-fartsy teams out from there and shake the tree. Let cyber-branding strike the big gong of marketing. Let the nay-sayers and traditionalists hide and let the games begin! This is how it’s being done.

    Winning It All

    Under the right circumstances and combinations, the results can be magical and so fast that it will pleasantly surprise the depressed accounting section. The idea here is to build a team with products and services and to apply new models of thinking by delivering core benefits directly to the end-user at a bullet speed, while eliminating internal bureaucracies.

    Simply outsource all or any unwarranted parts of your organization to other local or international players as much as possible. Just keep the marketing and sales with critically supportive components to make all that happen. That’s out of the box, out of the building and parking lot thinking. Try it; it’s very easy.

    The global population has only seen the spherical earth only in photos and movies, and has a mental picture, which is imaginary, as we all have yet to see this personally, standing from another far away planet. So for now, to most of us, it’s just one flat Earth. Let’s just skate.

  • A New Lingo Calls for a New World Order

    For corporate executives, it is still a very challenging task to fully understand these new terminologies and how they can deliver all this brand new magic. After all, everyone is convinced that to some degree, they already have a custom-built system to provide this BAM and CEM capability..

    The language of the business culture, or “corporate-lingo,” took a dramatic turn with the advent of the word “software.” What changed is history. Now, once again, techie lingo is teasing our communication skills and our corporate understanding.

    There are terms like BAM for “Business Activity Monitoring” and CEM for “Complex Event Management.” What these new terms are trying to ask us is how well we run our corporate circus.

    BAM amounts to the tools to manage a great three-ring circus under a huge tent. Simply put, it will keep the masters of ceremonies up to date on what’s happening at any given time. They can see why the clowns, once again, are not behaving properly or why the elephants are having indigestion again, and even why, despite management warnings, the risk-taking lion tamer is still alive and laughing all the way to the bank.

    Corporate Circus

    That kind of stuff. Basically it is all about new sets of tools so that the entire circus activity is simultaneously monitored and displayed graphically in living colors. It sounds so simple.

    For corporate executives, it is still a very challenging task to fully understand these new terminologies and how they can deliver all this brand new magic. After all, everyone is convinced that to some degree, they already have a custom-built system to provide this BAM and CEM capability. However, in reality, today’s business activity critically needs much higher-level cross-silo-real-time integration — something where traditional software has just about failed. This new challenge by this new technology starts a brand new war of the words.

    The technology champions — or the fine trapeze artists — of this new corporate circus boldly claim that this is a brand new revolution. Time will tell. Best we first relate to the general corporate perceptions and attitudes, particularly the mindset with computational understanding before the word software was fully understood and created a revolution. Here, branding comes into play.

    One of the main applications of this new technology is being tested on the U.S. requirements under the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, and on a similar rule under Bill C6 in Canada. Apparently this technology enables extraordinary control over things as they occur rather than catch them in periodic sampling.

    Catch the Culprits

    There are too many emerging issues; Internet fraudsters, motivated by money and armed with sophisticated technology, pose an increased economic threat, while corporations have exhausted their resources on these ever-growing problems.

    Bashir Fancy, in the past, has been executive vice president of Risk Management and also senior vice president of Internal Audit for Visa International. Prior to that, he was head of Risk Management for Visa Canada. He strongly claims that this new BAM technology is the way to go.He explains: “We can catch the crooks before they disappear, this technology, once applied, allows you to have your compliance monitored in real time … just as it happens.”

    Bashir, now chief operating officer of www.nmiinc.com, flags his out-of-box product, “ATMA,” as a toolkit for Sarbanes-Oxley. His solution fully leverages the client’s existing infrastructure and non-intrusively offers compliance, enabling a real-time sample mode.” Fraud is an abnormal behavior in a normal environment, and with BAM, we can catch it in time” Bashir says. “We bring BAI, or Business Activity Integration, as the new real game.” The compliance and fraud sectors both require a major shift in thinking as it is no longer a question of just maintenance, rather it is all about prevention. Real time monitoring across silos now provides this opportunity.

    Variations of BAM, such as BSC for service components and BPM for process management, are all the new big ideas on the horizon. It seems that BAM or its related components must be clearly understood by corporate executives before they can fully appreciate the power behind these simple acronyms.

    New Order of Business

    The application of these new technologies will dramatically enhance and improve customer relationship management (CRM), cross-selling, security and compliance. Eventually, they will change the thinking for the entire corporate body about how to run operations designed to oversee all activities in real time across the total enterprise. It might sound too good to be true — just like the early concept of the Web.

    Marketing new concepts takes a long time, and once they are understood, they take off like a rocket. Today there are hundreds of new technology companies all claiming some kind of dramatic improvements in operations with the use of BAM and CEP. For those technology companies that really have this side of the technology mastered and have the tools ready to go, these new platforms will work and they will do wonderful things. Like anything else, once properly applied, they can certainly kickstart a new kind of a revolution.

    While the term “IT” along with its existing software and hardware is almost at a standstill, perhaps there is something very powerful and secretly hidden in the “B” word along with these new terminologies. This new corpo-lingo pushes the envelope for a global mindshare and how to manage business activity integration in real time while creating better business models, all aimed to create real power.

    Something never seen before? Will it create a new world for the business empires? Will it create new real-time monitoring standards and control and set new order? For now, let the real clocks chime in real time.

    Remember, in the early start up stage, the terms software, hardware, Internet, e-mail or Web were all just some strange lingo. BAM anyone?