OBAs are a new breed of application that combines the use of the Office system with information and processes defined in line-of-business systems (LOBs). OBAs are a type of composite application. Composite applications are focused on enabling an effective way to build business applications that are contextual, collaborative, easy to use, role-based, and configurable. Today’s businesses need to be more agile to be competitive, and this need depends on access to information and its integration with various business processes, thus bringing to light this new type of software application called an Office Business Application.
The activities that most affect a company’s success today are usually not transactional and transformational jobs that involve mechanization and automation, such as assembly-line work and data entry. An established and growing class of employees can now accomplish work tasks by exchanging information and making judgments about a variety of data gleaned from a variety of interactions. These information workers (IWs) typically make business decisions based on people-to-people interactions and information deriving from e-mail, phone conversations, or one-off discussions with colleagues in the hallway. IWs include salespeople, marketing managers, product designers, lawyers, and engineers, and usually make significant contributions to the sustenance and growth of a business. However, this significance often depends on how easily and consistently they can access the information they need to do their jobs and make decisions.
Let’s look at a common business process that is illustrated in Figure 1-1. The scenario is related to a basic sales process, beginning with a sales lead and ending with the creation of a customer invoice. The first and most important item to point out is that most people think about the lower box only when discussing a business’s structured process. In fact, the real business process takes place in a very ad-hoc manner, as illustrated in the top box. No business process is simple, and processes always involve a human element, which gathers information, negotiates, collects data, and, based on all that information, makes immediate business decisions that affect the business in a positive or negative way. This ad-hoc process is part of the unstructured business process, which is where all the most valuable information is assembled. In this unstructured business process, the people taking actions need immediate access to information, but in most cases the people do not have the types of data they need. OBAs provide the ability to bridge people and information. Bridging this information provides the ability to surface information in a multitude of ways to applications that are commonly used by IWs, such as Microsoft Office Outlook.
OBAs represent the integration of both structured and unstructured processes, and they are being included in innovative solutions developed by some of the world’s largest software companies—including Microsoft with Dynamics Snap and Duet, a partnership of Microsoft and SAP—and solutions from independent software vendors (ISVs) such as Bentley Systems, Autodesk, and KnowledgeLake.
To help you understand what technologies and capabilities make up the foundation of OBAs, the next several sections will describe the platform’s capabilities and supporting services.