The Four Hundred

What if you could design and model the processes that embody your business with an electronic tool that allowed you to map it onto your IT infrastructure, much as a CAD/CAM program embodies the design of a product and helps turn it into a real product through the manufacturing process? Well, Unisys has come up with a combination of products, services, and methodologies for industries in which it has deep expertise that it says offers this functionality. This is called Business Blueprinting.

While IBM, Hewlett-Packard, and Sun Microsystems are battling out the future of computing with their respective On Demand, Adaptive Enterprise, and N1 initiatives for virtualized, utility computing, Unisys is taking a slightly different tack on generating new sales in new areas. Rather than adopting any of these initiatives or trying to compete against IBM, HP, and Sun in this religious war about how to build future computer systems, middleware, and systems management software for automating the running of these systems, Unisys wants to change the topic of conversation away from on demand, virtualized computing--automating the systems--to the automation of business processes that map onto IT infrastructure. That, in short, is what Business Blueprinting is all about. And it is a completely cross-platform initiative.

Unisys unveiled its Business Blueprinting initiative yesterday at the Rainbow Room at Rockefeller Center in New York, drawing in a large crowd of analysts, press, and customers. Unisys has a respectable share of the enterprise system sales at insurance and financial services firms in the New York area, so packing the room doesn't necessarily mean anything in terms of enthusiasm about Business Blueprinting. But it does indicate that Unisys is taking the Business Blueprinting initiative very seriously, and that the company is confident enough about the current IT environment to fork out a lot of dough to host a major media event. This is a good barometer.

In fact, during the launch of the Business Blueprinting initiative, Unisys chairman and CEO Larry Weinbach said that there is a backlog of demand for IT projects, but that the uncertainty in the business environment and past excesses, especially during the Y2K, ERP, and dot-com booms where IT organizations around the globe spent $60 billion on IT gears and wares with little return or business justification, are keeping a lid on spending. In 2001 and 2002, Weinbach said that IT spending fell by 15 percent, and that profits at IT companies were down 35 percent to 40 percent, and that many companies are under water.

Business Blueprinting is an attempt by Unisys to identify and fix the real problems with IT projects, which anyone in the industry will immediately identify with. Surveys done by Unisys as it was preparing the Business Blueprinting products and services for market are illustrative. According to those surveys, says Weinbach, 26 percent of companies reported that they completed less than half of the IT projects they start, and 80 percent of those who do finish projects do not deliver applications within their budgets.

"Industry analysts who reviewed our survey data say the numbers are worse," says Weinbach. "But it doesn't matter if it is worse or in between. The situation is bad." To bring it on home to the audience, Weinbach said that the current way that companies implement applications is akin to a person building or remodeling a house without a blueprint only to find out that they have the plumbing going to one side of the house and the bathroom installed on the other side. And, in a comment that will probably resonate with the increasing IT temptation to offshore and outsource application development to countries where labor is cheaper, Weinbach added: "If you don't have a blueprint, you can't go offshore. How can you get people to build something without explaining what you are doing?" Business blueprinting applies equally well to the legacy mainframe, OS/400, and VMS applications still working out there as it does to new applications running on newer platforms.

The discussion on Business Blueprinting that Unisys hosted makes one wonder what IT organizations have been doing all these years. If you ask George Colony, the founder of consultancy Forrester Research who was on hand during a panel discussion at the New York event, what happens more times than not is that CEOs, CFOs, and CIOs just throw what he calls "naked technology" into their organizations, buying applications that competitors have and just launching them into their companies at great cost without thinking about how they need to re-engineer their business processors first and then find or write the applications that map to those processes second.

The Business Blueprinting scheme that Unisys has come up with aims to solve this problem, which is just as costly to a business in terms of lost IT dollars as having cranky, incompatible systems that take boatloads of people to manage. (IBM and Sun are focusing in this latter part of the IT budget with their On Demand and N1 initiatives, and HP is aiming for similar things with major part its Adaptive Enterprise initiative).

According to Fred Dillman, vice president of technology and architecture for Unisys' Global Industries unit, Business Blueprinting creates digital descriptions of business processes and IT infrastructure that companies can play with to see where there are redundancies in their systems and processes that can be streamlined to cut costs and improve customer service. In addition to what effectively is a digital simulation of a business, its decision making processes, its transactions, and the IT infrastructure that supports (and cost estimating tools that can predict what changes in applications will cost), Business Blueprinting includes lots of services. As such, the cost of Business Blueprinting is difficult to fathom, but an initial assessment just to reckon what to do to implement Business Blueprinting, according to one Unisys source, could run from $25,000 to several hundred thousands of dollars, depending on the complexity of the environment or the business.

Dillman, who has been spearheading the Business Blueprinting effort, says that it will be delivered to the market in three different ways, and with complete agnosticism for server platforms, operating systems, middleware, and applications (legacy or third party). The first way is through a straight systems integration mode through the services unit at Unisys. Rather than integrating systems, however, this would really be an integration of company management with IT management and infrastructure. The second way to get a Business Blueprinting package is to buy one of several Unisys application suites the company has developed for its mainframes and Wintel platforms; the company is deploying new applications (in the same healthcare, financial services, insurance, and government industries) using new technologies like J2EE and .NET. The third way to get this product is to engage Unisys in a Business Process Outsourcing contract, basically shifting the responsibility for the IT infrastructure to Unisys and using the blueprint to keep the outsourced applications current with business needs. Dillman says that one of the dirty little secrets in the IT outsourcing business is that when you outsource, the company you outsource to has very little incentive to change or update applications to keep them modern and relevant. So what happens over the course of five to ten years (a term for an outsourcing contract) there is a tremendous gap between what a companies needs in terms of applications and what it gets from an outsourcer. By putting apps on a blueprint and always keeping them current, Unisys reckons it can still make money on the outsourcing contracts and end up with customers who want to re-up for their outsourcing contracts.

The trick to making Business Blueprints work is saving money for customers, of course. Unisys knows this and backed up its claims with some early statistics from the products and services it has developed under the blueprint. According to Joe McGrath, executive vice president of the Enterprise Transformation Services unit at Unisys, the company has implemented the methodology across the applications it uses to control its eleven worldwide development labs. An unspecified number of early adopter customers, including Dutch banking and insurance powerhouse ING Group and the Belgian court system, have used the methodology, too. McGrath says that Business Blueprinting improves cycle times for work by 25 percent to 40 percent, improves programmer and end user productivity by 75 percent to 100 percent, and reduces redundancies in systems by 30 percent to 50 percent. When you do the math on the budgets, that came out to a cost savings of 25 percent to 60 percent for IT and related costs in the businesses where they implemented Business Blueprints. At ING, which used the blueprint methodology to better automate its process for accepting new insurance customers and getting policies processed, Business Blueprinting increased the level of straight-through processing from 10 percent to 60 percent for all policies by tweaking the way these policies were handled by people and systems. Overall, policies required 40 percent less handling, and the time of delivering a policy dropped from several days down to several minutes. The cost of getting a policy processed dropped by 75 percent at ING, and the overall reduction in the IT budget as related to policy processing was 25 percent.

Unisys can't do this alone, of course, and had been planning to tap Microsoft, its long-time ally in the modern enterprise computing space, to help it push Business Blueprinting. Unisys was also working with tool provider Rational on an alliance prior to its acquisition by IBM, and now Unisys has a stronger alliance with IBM by virtue of that acquisition. Unisys seems keen on encouraging customers to move to a Web services model using .NET and J2EE, and has partnered with Microsoft for .NET tools and middleware and IBM for Rational tools and WebSphere middleware.

Unisys is delivering Business Blueprinting for the following areas in which it has deep expertise from its 50 years in computing: life insurance, pension plan administration, property and casualty insurance, banking and mortgage, enterprise payments, airline reservations, heath claims processing, health and human services, justice and public safety, tax and revenue management, registry and ID, cargo security, multimedia messaging, newspaper and Web publishing, and integrated trade replenishment.