Never before has it been more important for CEOs and CIOs to leverage information technology to automate their businesses. Increasing the operational efficiency of the existing workforce will be one of the primary drivers of business growth for years to come, and IT will be the means to deliver this.

This demand for process automation is creating a boost for BPM (Business Process Management) and BPA (Business Process Automation) products. Products like IBM Business Process Manager, Oracle Business Process Management or the new Visual Workflow from Salesforce.

So what does automation have to do with API-enabled applications?

Well, in order to improve workforce efficiency, business processes must be streamlined and manual processes must be fully automated.

This means that every application in a business process flow must be able to talk to other applications automatically, and until now the only way applications could talk to each other was through APIs.

So if you had no APIs, you could forget about automation. If you have been using any of the standard BPM products on the market, you know what I’m talking about. Basically this barrier is the biggest flaw with all of the existing BPM products — they depend on APIs that often don’t exist.

And it gets worse:

New web-based business apps are being cranked out at higher and higher volume. These applications are everywhere: inside your business, residing in the cloud (SaaS apps), and at your business partners’ or customers’ (B2B apps) locations. These are the applications that power some of the most important processes in your business:

1. Pricing Comparison
2. HR Processes
3. B2B Processes
4. Financial Account Aggregation
5. Supply Chain Optimization
6. Data Collection
7. Regulatory Compliance
8. Competitive Price Monitoring
9. Social Media Monitoring
10. Marketing Intelligence
11. Financial/Equity Research
12. Legal Evidence Collection
13. Management Reporting

These applications, more often than not, do not have documented APIs, making integration and, therefore, business process automation, almost impossible until now.

But there is a new approach to quickly API-enable any application in order to automate your business processes.

An enterprise-class application integration platform like Kapow Katalyst features a built-in Automation Browser that lets you wrap any web application as if it already had a documented API — essentially API-enabling the application and making it ready for those important automation projects.

This not only eliminates the need to rewrite internal applications, but also eliminates the challenge of working with external applications you cannot rewrite such as B2B and SaaS apps. With Kapow Katalyst you can create a complete integration or automation solution extremely efficiently.

Back to the Myth:

To automate business processes you need your applications to be API-enabled.

True for standard BPM products, False if you use Kapow Katalyst.

Let’s improve business efficiency today.

Stefan Andreasen, founder and CTO, Kapow Software

By: Stefan Andreasen

Companies across the world are employing lean enterprise practices to eliminate “wasteful” activities, i.e. activities that are not adding value. However, one is often left with a number of indispensable, rote tasks that consume staff resources but do not easily lend themselves to further optimizations. Should we as managers be satisfied with this? No — with any kind of repetitive task we should be looking for a way to automate it.

Consider how much time employees waste every day keeping systems in sync because no proper APIs or integration points exist between these systems. Take for instance the US Army Corps of Engineers that was facing the challenge of coordinating payments to contractors and employees across 13 districts, each with its own project management system. Using the Kapow Katalyst platform for process automation, they set up automated synchronization between the local systems and the central systems, resulting in savings of $2 million.

Similarly, the Spanish call center provider Atento had an army of people employed to type in data from printed forms, as this had to be done each time a new customer account was set up. Again, with the Kapow Katalyst platform for process automation, the account processing could be done automatically — leading to both the re-allocation of staff to more productive tasks as well as an improvement in the data quality due to the elimination of human errors in the data entry.

This ties in nicely with iSixSigma’s top four metrics of success of a lean project:

• Revenues
• Costs
• Risk
• Customer Satisfaction

As illustrated by the cases above, process automation can contribute to all of these key areas. It enables the organization to scale; growing the top line without incurring proportional costs in staffing to meet back-office demands. Employees can be freed to spend the bulk of their time on activities that yield core business value, leading to a more focused and agile enterprise. This is lean in its purest form.

By: Anne-Sofie Nielsen

Leveraging investments in legacy apps with application integration

I’ll bet that most people who hear the term “legacy application” think of an outdated and complex on-premise application that is bound to old mainframe platforms, has an old-fashioned user interface, and is very difficult to integrate or modernize.

But in reality any application is “legacy” as soon as it goes into production and we no longer develop it to meet new business requirements.

Today, applications are cranked out faster than ever before to meet increasing business demands resulting in an explosion of legacy applications. The stereotypical definition in the first paragraph above is as outdated as the applications it describes.

The consequence is that most “new” legacy applications are most likely “modern” web apps running on Java or .NET based app servers. Not particularly old-fashioned but legacy apps nonetheless.

I’m talking about those homegrown intranet and extranet web apps found all over most large enterprises today. Applications developed by people no longer with the company or by a systems integrator you no longer work with.

I often hear comments along the lines of, “We have thousands of legacy web apps sitting around our company, and we have no clue how to integrate them!”

Sound familiar?

The situation requires an attitude change. We need to rethink what we can do with legacy applications. Legacy apps and the content they hold are something we can leverage, just like any other investment, rather than something we have to try to replace. Call it IT’s version of re-use or recycle.

But in order to leverage legacy apps efficiently, we need easy integration.

Instead of spending a couple of years and a million dollars recoding your legacy apps or waiting for your external business partner to provide that vital API, you could spend a few weeks and maybe a hundred thousand dollars and not write a line of code. The latter is now possible using a revolutionary approach to application integration.

A new class of application integration solutions eliminates the dependency on missing APIs and can rapidly deliver full programmatic application control to any legacy web application. If the application can be used in a web browser, these new application integration solutions can automatically extract, transform, integrate, and migrate that data and application logic, without an API. This approach gives IT a hyper-agile way to perform enterprise, web, and cloud data integrations — as well as mobile enablement. Why make it more complicated than it needs to be?

Start leveraging those legacy applications now… you can’t afford not to.

By: Stefan Andreasen