Agresso’s Architectural Philosophy - Moving Data
Agresso’s Architectural Philosophy - Overview
There is consensus throughout the IT analyst and enterprise architecture community that organizational agility – the ability to move swiftly, cost- and resource-effectively through ongoing business change – relies on 2 things:
- Optimal Design/Structure - Getting DATA OUT versus IN to an organization's data warehouse
- Inter-coupling of Data - Moving Data, Business Processes and Reporting/Analytics (delivery) in lockstep (the balance)
The Quest for "Good Legs"
Agresso’s architecture is profoundly different than the rest of the ERP landscape. In vintner’s terms, it has “good legs,” able to stand on its own without any marketing spin to gain appreciation. Its strong foundation or “good legs”, disallows for bitter, unpleasant and surprising ERP costs.
The key, according to founding members of Agresso’s original design team, including one who today is Agresso’s CTO – is a fundamental focus on GETTING DATA OUT versus IN to an organisation’s data warehouse.
“Thirty years ago, Agresso was fundamentally a database management company – so our focus was on achieving a connoisseur-level of data coding, tagging and tracking,” says Anders Hauan, Chief Technology Officer of Agresso. “To say we were concerned about how the data model was configured would be an understatement. We were obsessed with getting it right from the start; we were young developers in competition with each other and with the rest of the market. We knew that we were doing things differently than everybody else…and that we were mavericks. Truthfully, there was no way to know that some 30 years later that our quest for a distinctive architecture would put Agresso in a superior technology position to serve Businesses Living IN Change.”
Agresso’s original design team agreed on a universal philosophy to create a generic data model versus a specific data model that would have been locked in and static. While customers can repeatedly change their Agresso solution, Hauan’s team built in underlying “fail-safe” mechanisms to ensure that all change tracks back to the same physical data model. It is the best of both worlds for organizations – particularly those in continual change mode: the metadata and the correlating relationships remain pure, but the business data, processes and delivery methodology can be configured and reconfigured again. Best of all, it can be done internally, without expensive outside IT intervention.
The Inter-coupling of the Data, Process and Delivery Model
The Inter-coupling of the Data, Process and Delivery Model
Agresso is different both architecturally and substantively in that VITA combines its data model, process model and delivery model into a cohesive unit. A change made in any one of these areas, automatically flows intelligently and makes associated changes and adjustments throughout the system. This combination not only impacts the bottom line, but it impacts the corporate strategies selected by management.
Beware: this is not the same as plugging applications together in an open framework so that they connect together – it is much more fundamental and much more difficult to achieve if you haven’t built the entire framework that way in advance.
Agresso’s VITA architecture understands the smallest data, business processes or reporting/analytics change intuitively throughout the system. It has the embedded intelligence to adjust all trailing data/process/ delivery parts.
For example, organizations can make worldwide, global-reaching process and/or data changes on the fly. Imagine a company moves eight of 10 business divisions completely over to a Six Sigma Business Process approach, replacing the business practices/workflow framework for those eight divisions. Yet it wants all 10 of its payroll systems to completely adjust to Six Sigma practices. The two remaining divisions are left with business process change in only one functional area, which Agresso recognizes.
Because of the three-part integration of the data/process and delivery models, Agresso is able to easily flow the Reporting and Analytics to the two divisions via the old methodology, but understands and supports the newer methodology across all divisions for payroll. A change like this could take months to separate out re-coding of the underlying data, then the business processes, and then the reporting and analytics. For Agresso, the correlation and relationships of those three areas makes changes like these easy. Company executives can change and change again, as their businesses grow, consolidate, and/or if they need to respond to new workplace dynamics.
Agresso VITA is the living architecture for the IT Connoisseur who wants an active part in the success of his or her company.