Red buttons signaling warnings were lit all over the management console of the interface. The engineers turned to him and asked if he had given them bummed data for the test.
The data were authentic, and Hayes has got a big problem on his hands.
-Internally, we knew all along that something was wrong, but there was no way of getting at it," said the director in a heavy English accent, -now it's all out in the open."
Automating business practices can reveal a lot more than you bargain for and figures don't lie.
Released April last year, the BizWorks suite was the first major offering produced by Computer Associate's applications division, InterBiz. CA created the unit in early 1999 to spearhead the company's drive into the field of providing e-business applications.
Being the first major product - and continuing today as the division's flagship offering - BizWorks represented a transition in CA's role as a solutions provider.
-Until InterBiz came along, CA's role has been in providing ERP, and back-office systems integration," noted Gary Layton, InterBiz's vice president for marketing, at this year's CA World. -InterBiz changed all that by adding the business processes component."
InterBiz technology, however, remained solidly CA. The strategy has been to develop applications that are relevant to business operations by building on CA's conventional strength in information integration and business intelligence. The BizWorks suite, as a matter of fact, had at first been marketed as an -e-business intelligence suite."
The marketing positioning has since moved away from intelligence to business processes, but the underlying technology remains the same.
-Absolutely, it is an intelligence tool, people buy it to integrate their information asset, they begin to derive value from it by the way they can visualise and tell them what's going on in their business," said Layton. -Our challenge has been that it has so many different aspects, it manages processes, it integrates data, it predicts ... you can conceivably place it in any one of those categories because it essentially exists in a place where there is no defined category today."
Information integration and intelligence applications were precisely the fundamentals that Hayes was looking for when he was approached by InterBiz sales.
Places for People (NBH) owns and operates 50 000 units of housing across the United Kingdom and doles out about 37 million English pounds a year to contractors for maintenance jobs done on their properties.
The problem was: it took NBH two months to analyse and collate the information they have on those jobs. It'll be another month for a manager to get involve and sort the issues out when a contractor under-performs. By the time NBH is done getting the contractor online, the customer would have suffered 3 months of bad performance.
The proof-of-concept run that Hayes conducted with the initial BizWork system had been precisely to find out the number of jobs that the organisation needed to pay close attention to. The answer was overwhelming.
-One of the things that I've found as an IT director over the years is that legacy systems and so forth are very good at what they do," said Hayes. -The hardest part from the manager's point of view is getting information that's in the right context, at the right time to allow them to make an informed decision about something that affect their business."
