This is not a simple turn-key solution, nor is it something easily achieved without taking a step-by-step approach to your complex environments.
Let's face it, there have been many commitments made in the past to certain technology paths. There are legacy investments that are still returning enough value to cause hesitation when reaching to pull their plug. There could be partially completed projects that were chosen in the course of spending political capitol, making it nearly impossible to abandon them without endangering the entire IT landscape.
These are just a few of the issues that necessitate one of the first steps being to evaluate optimizing existing IT investments.
Existing IT
When looking to update or modernize the existing IT investments, it's about optimizing existing work.
There are many systems, services, applications and processes that make up the IT landscape. The trick is to obtain a view of them while moving towards business goals by leveraging quick wins by bringing together that existing work in new and effective ways. Business processes can often be found that leverage existing components, that once organized in a new way begin to immediately provide new business value.
To illustrate this line of thought, let's imagine starting by leveraging existing deployed workloads and services to optimize a Human Resources department.
Modernizing HR
Each example below is optimizing by leveraging existing projects and investments, while deploying in a modern container-based Cloud platform using open technologies. They may exists as standard hosted hardware deployments, on private cloud solutions, in public cloud hosting or in hybrid-cloud environments. All four footprints are possible when leveraging open technologies and modern application development, showcased through the Red Hat Cloud Suite product.
HR Employee Rewards
The first example is to boost moral in the organization, a quick win for any organization. Using existing services that can update an employee file and another to distribute email notifications, a process application is quickly pulled together for submitting and approving employee recognition awards.A quick little process project providing user task for award recognition approval, a mocked service for updating an employee file and custom email notification. An easy win for organizations leveraging existing work for new workloads.
Available online and leverages open technologies such as JBoss EAP and JBoss BPM Suite along with the OpenShift Container Platform to deliver a nice optimized solution. The solution can also be built from scratch by following this online free workshop.
HR Vacation Request
This example is to streamline an existing process that lacks optimization by automating the error prone manual task of employee vacation requests.A small process is pulled together to leverage an existing REST service, some existing business logic (business rules) and partially automating the user task of manually approving vacation requests. Based on the rules, some of the vacation requests can now be automatically approved and only the problem cases need to be manually reviewed by an HR employee.
Available online and leverages open technologies such as JBoss EAP and JBoss BPM Suite along with the OpenShift Container Platform to deliver a nice optimized solution.
Optimize IT series
This is not the only article in the series. |
| AppDev in the Cloud with Red Hat Cloud Suite |
If interested in reading more you can catch up on the other areas learning how optimizing process applications enables leveraging your existing investments:
Stay tuned for the other articles coming soon.