Frictionless Business Ecosystems

In the previous post I described how the Australian lending industry was a great example of friction-loaded business ecosystem and how LIXI standards are aimed at reducing some of that friction.
In conversations with LIXI ‘veterans’ over the years, I’ve learnt a lot about the history of the Australian lending industry and how things have changed. [...]

Read Why we work with LIXI (pt. 2) in full →

Anyone who has purchased property, or at least considered it, has at least a basic understanding of the process: You get a loan approval from the bank, do the deal with the real estate agent, sign the loan contract and get your friendly solicitor to manage the conveyancing.
But when you unpack this there is much [...]

Read Why we work with LIXI (pt. 1) in full →

In the very first post on this site I described how our team’s R&D work was concerned with reducing friction in and between business ecosystems. I defined what we generally mean by the term business ecosystems and provided a very cursory definition of friction and its various forms.
Since further posts here will describe different scenarios [...]

Read Friction: A Recap and Overview in full →

A very promising technology prototype has come out of several years of research within our group, led by senior researcher Dr. Jenny Liu.  The NICTA Adaptation Engine is piece of software that sits (non-intrusively) within a service-oriented IT environment and helps avoid the meltdown scenario, complimenting our performance modeling and simulation technology.  It can sense [...]

Read Seeking industry validation partners in full →

In the previous post I described the nascent need for business rules and their implementation in new software systems.  This is a technology that takes the computerisation of business processes up a level in terms of power and flexibility (and reducing friction in business ecosystems, of course!).
But as this approach makes its way into the [...]

Read Validating your business rules in full →

Imagine a traditional business or a public service that processes a lot of paper forms according to a set of rules. In the old days it was easy: Customers (or citizens) would turn up at their local branch or the relevant office at 10am and stand patiently in an orderly queue for hours on end [...]

Read Business rules and forms processing in full →

On Monday I was present at a very well-attended meeting run by the AIIA, on the recently-announced changes to the R&D tax concessions / credits scheme.
I went along from a position of relative naivety, expecting to hear a rather prosaic description of mundane changes to some legislation regarding accounting changes for the scheme.  NICTA is [...]

Read The murky future of Australian R&D tax concessions in full →

I’m very pleased to announce that Anna Liu has accepted NICTA’s offer of appointment to the role of project leader, Business Adaptation and Interoperation.
Anna succeeds Professor Ross Jeffery, who has headed up this group and the original Empirical Software Engineering research program since NICTA was launched in 2003.
Ross doesn’t escape with a full retirement yet, [...]

Read Dr. Anna Liu, Project Leader, NICTA Business Adaptation and Interoperation in full →

Business-to-business integration (B2Bi) is old-hat.  A robust technology to allow the systems of two (or more) business to be integrated.  An archetypal example is a direct purchase order/invoicing system between business customers and their suppliers.  In these transactions, orders and invoices are being exchanged automatically and electronically, the relevant data fields being extracted and populated [...]

Read Do we really need to speak the same language? in full →

One of the most general manifestations of business friction relates to an organisation’s business processes.  The science of business processes comprises a vast field of study, practice and solutions, with a long history and rich collection of exemplars and case studies.
For a business (or government agency, etc.) that makes or manages anything in volume (producing [...]

Read Business process fragments in full →