How did you dedicate yourself to the automation and orchestration of processes?
Early in my professional career I had the opportunity to work for one of the most important consultancies in Córdoba that had developed a global Workflow & BPM product and had large clients, including a company that was on its way to being the main Argentine credit card issuer. This company was experiencing a period of great growth and needed a reengineering of one of its business processes so that it could dynamically scale according to the growing demand, as a result of its expansion. Specifically, it was its account opening and credit limit assignment follow-up system, which represented an essential part of its business. More specifically, everything that happens from the customer’s initial order until he receives his credit card ready to be used.
What was the need? The original process was slow, inefficient, and error-prone because it included a large number of manual tasks whose progress was tracked using emails, spreadsheets, and even physically sending forms from one area to another. The objectives were very clear, the management sought to reduce the total time required, increase the quality and improve the follow-up of the efforts.
The scenario was suitable for the work that consisted in the implementation of an automation and orchestration system for all these tasks.
Could you tell a little about what orchestration is and how it helped to solve these problems?
Just as orchestration in music ensures that a large ensemble of individual instruments play in time and in tempo, in software orchestration ensures that processes, systems and services occur at the right time and in the right order. It is worth clarifying that there are different types of orchestration: along with process orchestration there is also data orchestration and infrastructure orchestration (DevOps). In the case of this company, the orchestration of data and processes made it possible to model an efficient business process based on a chain of automations, eliminating dispersed data silos and unifying them in a single information system that could be used to improve decision-making. decisions in real time and enabled the continuous improvement of the process. Specifically, delivery times that were previously several weeks and, in some cases, even months, we managed to reduce to a few days with the added value of being able to have detailed knowledge of the status of each process. This implementation was recognized by the Workflow Management Coalition as the best BPM solution for Latin America.
You mentioned infrastructure orchestration. What is it about? Do you have any concrete example?
Infrastructure orchestration more than anything refers to the automation of provisioning, management and scalability of cloud computing resources, also known as DevOps, which allows dynamic resource management based on real-time processing needs, optimizing costs. and looking for an excellent user experience at all times. Having this orchestrated today has become a necessity for any company, regardless of its size. A recent case of successful implementation in this area was with a leading company in the higher education sector that had serious scalability problems and large operating costs derived from a poor strategy in the use of its infrastructure. My work consisted of orchestrating the creation of all its resources in the cloud with minimal manual intervention through mechanisms that allow the increase of its capacity automatically in periods of high demand and the immediate reduction of resources when they are no longer necessary. , enabling them to cut costs with their cloud service provider by 50% and dramatically improve the user experience by offering faster response times and always-on availability regardless of demand.
What do you think is the key to the success of this methodology?
There are several reasons, but perhaps the main one is that it is based on partitioning a complex process into simple and small tasks that facilitate the estimation, assignment and parallelization of the total work required. This helps to define project progress verification points, which allows early correction in the event of possible deviations. Decoupling the business logic into small tasks also makes it more flexible to introduce changes in order to quickly adapt to new needs. Another advantage is that this approach favors the participation of the different areas of the company in the definition of the important attributes that the system must consider beyond the fact that the modeling of the business process itself will be in charge of a software engineer or architect. who will be primarily responsible for designing the orchestration strategy.
As a software architect expert in orchestration, how would you describe this role?
In order to define the architecture of an Orchestration system, you will first need to have a global knowledge of the business. Then identify the areas and systems involved in the business process to be modeled, which implies multiple meetings with interdisciplinary teams to capture requirements and negotiate specifications. Once the system that is needed is understood, the business process can be modeled and all the tasks to be fulfilled by the development team that will produce the individual functionalities that will later be orchestrated according to the chosen platform, can be created. This process will always be continuous and incremental and requires different communication and technical skills. The architect will not only answer for the functional requirements, but also ultimately for the scalability, flexibility and ease of maintenance of the Orchestration system.
What is the trend in the orchestration industry right now?
This sector is currently experiencing a period of high growth. Having an adequate orchestration platform is the key to excellence in business processes. All the new technologies are being developed to be able to be orchestrated and integrated with the rest of the existing processes in each Company in response to increasingly complex customer demands. Currently, for example, we are already talking about Orchestration of Machine Learning Systems (MLO). In terms of the market, the current prediction is that orchestration needs will grow from $4 billion to $23 billion in this decade alone. The reason? New technologies will continue to emerge and that is something that will continue to rise. Orchestration will be the strategic key to maintaining control of this diversity of processes and technologies.
What are your current challenges?
I am currently helping an American company that provides Business Intelligence tools for marketing and sales teams with its Orchestration strategy. Business processes are really complex and a large number of systems developed with different technologies need to be integrated. The company also has a global development team with resources installed in different time zones around the world. The challenge is great, but the market and the opportunity are also great.
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