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. Converting participants to the LIXI way required a change in thinking for many – by taking them from the belief that their loan application systems and business processes gave them a unique competitive advantage, to the realisation that their competitors all do basically the same thing.  Hence these activities offer no competitive advantage at all and were obvious targets for standardising and streamlining.  Real competitive advantage in this part of the process comes from the ability to launch and execute new products and features and to respond to changes in customer behaviour and expectations quickly.

[Anecdotally I still hear of resistance to business standards adoption (in related industries, not lending!), on the grounds that incumbents believe that their way of processing forms provides them with a competitive advantage!   Any organisations that believe this must also realise that such an advantage cannot be sustainable and really should have a good hard think about where they are going!]

But back to the adoption of LIXI standards and the general movement to automated processing is also giving rise to some fairly dramatic transformations in the industry. For example:

• A marked shift from paper forms to electronic loan application submisssions – up to 80% of all loan originations are now lodged electronically based on LIXI standards.  Further, according to the CBA’s Michael Harte, with their new online platform they have cut approval time for home-loan top-ups from around 20 days to 15 minutes (this comes from Australia’s Digital Economy: Future Directions (c)  Commonwealth Bank of Australia and the Commonwealth of Australia, 2009).

• Consolidation of valuer and broker channels into aggregators and/or via electronic gateways, movements that don’t sit comfortably with everyone!

• The appearance of AVMs, or automated valuation models, yet another threat to the traditional business of certified property valuations.

Our team started working with LIXI in 2005. We produced the first reference model for the formal approval process – building on LIXI’s vocabulary work to try to address standard conversations of lending. In 2007 we developed and published the first reference implementation for the LIXI valuations process, and in 2008 we provided the architecture and samples for the ‘Visible Loans’ concept – a mechanism to package loan information (including product features) into RSS news feeds, to provide up-to-date information to brokers and loan customers.

In 2010 we continue to support LIXI’s efforts in integrating the settlements process with the newly-emerging National Electronic Conveyancing System (NECS).

LIXI, and the lending industry as a whole, continues to be a great source of use-inspiration for us. It builds our domain expertise, embedding our team within real business problems, and it informs the directions of our R&D. We look forward to further engagement with LIXI and its members, and we also look forward to working in other types of business ecosystems, in which we can apply some of the lessons we’ve learned from the lending industry.

We have patent applications working through the system and certainly want to see the technology reach commercial maturity and success.

But to get there requires an all-important step: Validation of the solution in an industry context.

We’ve done plenty of trials based on hypothetical scenarios run in our lab, and these have helped us refine the prototype and re-affirm our confidence that we’re onto something good here.  But what we need to move ahead is a real business scenario – an example business system with high performance characteristics and risks associated with failure of its component services.  Examples might come from a telco’s operations support system or business support system, integrated services within a banking environment or trading exchange, or other complex service environments.

Such an engagement would most likely involve as a first step us simulating the target system in our secure environment (or it could also be on our partner’s premises), at no cost and no risk, in order to ‘prove the concept’.  Assuming this were successful, the next step might be to plan for a production scale trial.  By the time we attain commercial maturity and success, we would of course expect our first validation customers to receive privileged terms for continued use of the technology.

But for now, it’s that first engagement that we’re chasing.  If this description does not sound like it matches needs within your organisation, perhaps you know someone for whom it does.  If so, spreading the word would be appreciated!

Thanks.

But as this approach makes its way into the mainstream of business infrastructure software, one new challenge that will become increasingly apparent is checking or validation of a collection of business rules. This is about spotting flaws – inconsistencies, loopholes, dead-ends, infinite loops, etc. These are flaws that can’t usually be spotted by looking at the rules one or a few at a time. To be completely confident that you’ve got a consistent rules set, you need a means to analyse the whole lot together.

Fortunately our researchers at NICTA have anticipated this looming challenge and have approaches to deal with the problem using formal logic principles. We are starting to work with some trial partners in industry and this may be the topic of a future post. But we’d certainly like to expand the range of scenarios in which this new technology is trialled.

The vision is quite simple: ‘Push-button’ formal logic analysis of your complete business rules set. Instant results will report that you’ve got a contradiction here and a loophole there, etc., thereby allowing corrections to be made before the processes are exposed to ‘production’ usage.  Further, as business policies (and therefore processing rules) change, you’ll want to know immediately whether your new rules will play nice with the existing ones.

If these scenarios resonate with you because you’ve been wondering how to deal with the problem of functioning business rules in your (or your client’s) environment, we invite you to comment here or talk to us.

[Aside: We still have physical queues - supermarket checkouts on a Saturday morning, or behind the gates at a concert or sporting event. And many people still have to line up at banks and other services like Centrelink, Medicare, and health insurance providers. But for most of us (ie., the demographic that can read this blog, at least), the rise of online self-servicing has done away with much of the need for physical queues and paper forms processing. I think of those bad old days and wonder at the staggering productivity cost of having to line up with paper forms. I assume someone somewhere has done a study on this...?]

That’s the front-end of the business, but for now I’m more interested in the back-end. In the back office there would be a small army of process workers in cubicles (they used to be called ‘clerks’) working through the pile of forms in their in-tray, processing each one according to a set of rules. Occasionally they’d have to put one into a ‘problem pile’ because it failed to satisfy one or more of those business rules.

In retrospect, computerising simple forms processing is intuitive and straightforward. And the business case should be a lay-down misere – remove a major chunk of the cost of that human forms-processing army.

The situation becomes more challenging when the forms and their processing, or more specifically the business rules, are more complex. The implementation of easily maintainable business rules in a computer system is non-trivial. Of course, business rules have been implemented in software forever – usually hard-coded within the business logic of applications. But by easily maintainable I mean that a business stakeholder (or someone on her team) can modify them in the system as needed, without requiring the lag and friction of software development support to re-code the changes.

There are tools out there that allow such business rules to be specified using standard or proprietary business rules languages. But business rules processing is not yet a widely adopted technology because it is still a young field – organisations are still learning about its power, and it’s not like there’s a huge pool of subject matter experts out there to draw on.  But they do exist in modest numbers, and NICTA is one place where you’ll find some of the best in the world. In fact, as they move ahead with the development of new tools for formal analysis of business rules (more on this in my next post), they’re eager to sink their teeth into more real-world business rules challenges. If you’re starting to work your way through the business rules maze and could do with some help from the experts, they’re right here – please call or email!

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 a registered research authority and therefore R&D services work contracted by our customers could have the potential to qualify for the concessions or credits in the future. To my knowledge, no NICTA client has yet had a contract in which the scheme could apply. However, a growing interest in providing R&D services, from both within NICTA and from its industry friends, could see this change quickly.  Hence it is very much in our interest to understand the scheme and how to satisfy the eligibility criteria.

But Monday’s meeting was certainly not mundane and some of the language used was anything but prosaic.

Ian Birks, CEO of the AIIA, gave an overview of the proposed changes and their implications for the ICT industry.  Previously, IT R&D had to satisfy one of two typical criteria: For an activity to qualify it required demonstrable innovation, or significant technical risk. Furthermore, an intention had to be shown that the activity will be made available for multiple sale or license, to rule out large internal infrastructure upgrades, for example.

Under the new law, claimants must demonstrate both innovation and significant technical risk for the project that must support core functions of the business. And the proposed rules related to ‘multiple sale’ have been hardened.

According to Peter Roberts of the Financial Review, Business Expenditure R&D (BERD) in Australia makes up about 1.2% of our GDP, below the OECD average of about 1.6%.  For the leading countries BERD is 2.5% or higher and in these cases their R&D tax benefits are already less constraining than ours – certainly the dual test has been rejected by most.

On the ‘prosaic language’ point, Roberts went further and said that the changes basically “emasculate” the intention and vision of the original R&D tax concession scheme introduced in 1985, which was about encouraging innovation and risk-taking in Australian business.

Suffice to say there was a lot of negative, but directed, energy in the room. On the positive side, most, if not all of the participants seem to believe that the changes have been drafted from a position of ignorance rather than malice or destructiveness, and this seems to be confirmed by reports on Tuesday. There was the suggestion that the ICT industry has been caught in an ‘unintended consequences trap’ as Treasury tries to cut out those from other industries who have rorted the scheme or distorted the application of its intended benefits. But there is also the belief that they’ve failed to seek thorough formal consultation on the new rules and the impact they will have. According to panellists and participants from large businesses and SMEs alike, that impact will be profound. For those that continue to do leading edge and/or risky stuff in IT, those risks will be pared back and costs will be cut, driving some further into the off-shoring camp. But for many others, it will basically mean that they cease their risky or innovative ventures.

As I mentioned above, the R&D tax concession (or credit) scheme is not something that has directly impacted our team’s research and external engagements, because we are not profit making nor have any of our contracts to date been structured with the scheme in mind.  But if the amendments are implemented as drafted and do indeed have the effect of driving ICT R&D away, or into mediocrity, then we’ll all be the poorer for it.

Let’s hope the authors of the changes can avoid a policy disaster on this one.

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, and will continue at NICTA in a part-time capacity working on a couple of new initiatives, one related to defence procurement and another on software development practices in car manufacturing.

It was only about 6 weeks ago that I reported on Anna’s position as contributed staff from UNSW (although some months earlier than that when she actually started), so I don’t need to restate her background. Plus, there are more informed sources of her bio elsewhere.

The addition of Anna to this team in a leadership role adds a whole new collection of experience, capability and industry linkages that will bring extra richness to the future of the whole team’s work. I’m really looking forward to working with her and discovering new opportunities for industry engagement and impact.

The challenges with this approach arise when you have many-to-many relationships in a business ecosystem with lots of different suppliers and customers.  Some solutions arise by mandate – the sheer market grunt of one or a few big players that dictate to everyone else what the rules are.  But without such a driving force, you either need everyone to agree on some common standards for describing things like purchase orders and invoices, or you have to engineer custom parsing B2B interfaces for each relationship.  Or, you just live with the friction and continue processing a subset of your orders via email or fax.

In the case of ‘common standards’, the example of purchase orders and invoices seems achievable universally, because they are items that are, in their most raw forms, common to every business.  While such standards might exist in certain industry pockets (RosettaNet for the chip manufacturing industry comes to mind), there is no universal standard for ecommerce transactions.  Furthermore, the challenge becomes even more interesting (to us, at least!) when you go beyond the ‘simple’ of purchase orders and invoices to the ‘complex’ – other types of business forms processing.

The home loan and conveyancing industry sectors, groups with which we’ve had some involvement already, are ecosystems in which the electronic exchanges are far more fiddly and fraught than online purchase order processing.  The National Electronic Conveyancing System (NECS) will attempt to address some of the efficiency needs in Australia.  In this case you have seven or eight state jurisdictional land titles offices, each with their own similar-but-different language for describing business activities, such as transfer of land title ownership. One NECS approach could be to mandate that all state offices use the same language for common transactions.  But this would require massive and disruptive changes within those agencies, some of which have been processing documents their own way for over a hundred years.

A more palatable alternative is to let the agencies continue to maintain their own language and create an 8-way dictionary -  a giant look-up table, or “universal translator” that supports not only human readability, but (eventually) software integration as well.  While a thorough and robust solution would accommodate modern semantic techniques and standards, it is a simple concept and certainly achievable.

We believe the same approach could apply in other industry scenarios too, although we don’t know what they are yet.  We would welcome any thoughts about other possible applications of this approach and/or industries where such needs exist, so invite our readers to post them here, or contact us by email (if you’d prefer to keep them quiet!).

For a business (or government agency, etc.) that makes or manages anything in volume (producing and marketing widgets, processing forms and cases, etc.), processes form the operational core of a business.  They dictate what happens when and by whom, and are often integrated deeply with capital equipment and/or major software systems.  Good processes allow the organisation to hum along like a well-oiled machine. Poor processes can become a millstone around the neck, weighing down the business and preventing it from providing the best customer service and responding quickly to threats and opportunities in its market.

For those who work in the business process world, this is simple, obvious and old-hat.  The business process management (BPM) techniques and business process management software (BPMS) markets are extremely crowded with vendors and consultants eager to help companies through these decisions (note that BPM is quite different to BPMS; look to the writings and references of BPTrends and Paul Harmon, its founder, for more depth on this).

At NICTA, one of our perspectives in the field of business processes is to look at them in light of web 2.0 technologies and business models. Consider business processes (or their parts) that are important to your business, but not necessarily core – activities that might be appropriately outsourced to someone else if they could do the job better and/or cheaper than you.  Or alternatively, what about process activities you do better and cheaper than anyone else in your industry (whether or not those processes are core to your business) – could it make sense to offer yourself as a provider of that process as a service to others in your industry?  Then imagine breaking up every aspect of your business, or in fact your whole industry, into a collection of processes or process fragments.  Imagine the power of being able to chop and change process fragments relating to your business activity at a whim, to uncover new efficiencies or to explore completely different and new ways of working and delivering value within your ecosystem.  The well-oiled machine metaphor then takes on a completely new meaning…

This is the vision of ‘business process mash-ups’, an active area of research within our group at NICTA.  Our researchers are exploring the ways and means for organisations to decouple process fragments from their existing infrastructure and increase their power and flexibility.  They are also using the inherent architecture of the web as a platform for implementing prototype solutions, with the lending and conveyancing industries providing some of the use-inspiration for the work.  As usual, we’d like to hear from others who recognise the challenges and benefits of approaches like these, as well as any solution experience you might have that addresses and/or debunks some or all of our vision in this space!

We all know that high value collaborations, in particular when they concern research, are hard to pull off. In my experience the critical success factors include (but are not limited to!) the following:

1. There must be genuine stakeholder support, preferrably at the executive level, for the collaboration.

In this case we can put a big tick in that box: Our executive support comes from the top of both organisations.

2. The overlap and alignment of the technical interests and capabilities of the respective teams must be strong.

At a high, abstract level at least, we can tick this box too – we’ve collectively identified three or four technology areas that will be the bases for candidate projects. Our next task is to sharpen up the capability descriptions and research focus areas into actual research projects. Then we’ll be on our way to creating something meaningful.

I was going to describe here some of the specific technology areas that Citrix is focused on and where the areas of overlap are with our expertise. But then again anyone could work this out for themselves just by looking at the relevant websites. More importantly, my point here is to emphasise the nature of the (intended) collaboration itself and the overall goals. We talk about collaboration all the time here, but it’s rare to actually secure the commitment of a large vendor like Citrix. This is the type of “genuine” industry engagement we’d like to have more of.

Actually, we did not achieve all that we wanted to this year. There were a few very significant industry engagement projects that we put a lot of effort into that did not crystallise into solid collaborations or deliverables. Some of this was certainly due to the economic slowdown. I saw a general reluctance on the part of senior business managers to make commitments to projects that could be considered innovative or outside the square. There’s no blame or excuse-making intended here – it’s just a reality that sometimes you can’t move mountains despite all the good intentions and goodwill in the world.

On the positive side, November and December have been showing signs that we’re on the leading edge of a bona fide upswing in confidence and commitment. I have fifteen project activities on my to-do list at present, ranging from contract signings through to research collaboration proposals and even marketing plans. This is both invigorating and exhausting, if such a paradoxical combination can be possible. It leaves hour-long commutes (twice a day!) the perfect situation for reflection and preparation of blog posts.

NICTA and its researchers still achieved plenty of milestones this year, which you can read up on by going to the relevant news sites (including NICTA’s own, of course). One item of note was the government announcement of the extension of NICTA’s federal funding through to 2015. Our own research team hit a few nice achievements too, including a patent application for our Adaptation Engine technology, and the development of an endorsed business plan and go-to-market strategy for ePASA . Commercialisation plans for our other technologies are also progressing well, and as mentioned above we have a few engagement contracts that are now coming to fruition.

I’m sure there are other important milestones I’m missing here, but my goal in this post is to be brief, not comprehensive. On that I’ll end by noting that it looks like a very busy and promising 2010, with some important news for our team anticipated early in the first quarter.

Until then, please have a very merry Xmas and a frictionless new year!