Business center and front end

By: Graffiti – Suming

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What is the Central Platform

1.1 The concept of The Central Platform

The concept of Zhongtai in China originated from the well-known Internet enterprise — Alibaba, so many enterprises have begun to build their own Zhongtai system, articles and books about Zhongtai also began to rise. But recently, The head of Ali Xiaoyao son has launched a de-Centralization, that the presence of centralization hinders the company’s rapid development. Why did the Central government establish and abolish the Central government? It all starts with what the middle stage is.

There is no official definition of what zhongtai is. In wang teacher in “when we talk about China, what are we talking about | vernacular China strategy is mentioned in the article about the understanding of China.

In some people’s eyes, the middle platform is the technology platform, such as microservices development framework, Devops platform, PaaS platform, container cloud, people call it “technology middle platform”.

In the eyes of some people: Taiwan is the micro service business platform, like the most common what user center, order center, all kinds of micro service distribution center, people call it “business in Taiwan”.

In the eyes of some people, the middle stage should be an organizational thing, releasing potential: similar to the internal resource scheduling center and internal innovation incubation organization of enterprises, people call it “organization middle stage”.

All of these are fine, but they just say what the middle platform is, not what it is. After reading a large number of articles, I probably found two definitions of Angle, which are more appropriate, but also somewhat obscure.

Positioning of the middle platform: The service middle platform is an abstraction of the foreground application, providing the business logic, data, and computing capabilities shared between multiple foreground services.

The value perspective of the Central office: the central Office is the collection of business capabilities, data capabilities, and computing capabilities provided by development resources shared across multiple departments

1.2 Differences between middle stage, front stage and back stage

In the previous front-end development, we divided the system into two parts: foreground and background. The front desk is the part of the product that users can contact directly. Users can directly produce their use behaviors here, such as placing orders on Taobao, watching videos on Douyin and publishing articles on Nuggets. And the background in addition to provide access to the foreground services, but also to manage the user generated data, will provide management system to manage, use these data, such as Taobao’s commodity management system.

Then we can know that the front desk is a front-end platform composed of various front desk systems, and each front desk system is a user touch point. Background is a back-end platform composed of background systems, each background system generally manages a class of core resources of the enterprise (data + computing).

The front desk and the background can meet the needs of enterprises and users, so what is the role of the middle stage in this?

In fact, Taiwan is the product of enterprise development and growth process of their own experience reuse, when they found taobao and Tmall goods have something in common, they do not repeat the wheel, background with a set of data model, the front only need to customize the page can reduce part of the development. And this concept, if you put it into programming, is exactly what we call reuse.

Therefore, the business center is an abstraction of foreground applications and provides business logic, data, and computing power shared between multiple foreground businesses.

An important feature of mid-stage is reuse, but not to a high degree. SAAS, as it is known, is an example of high reuse, directly reusing the shape of an industry or business. Users can take it and use it directly

1.3 Type of middle platform

The reader who notices the wording in the previous description will notice that “middle stage” is used one moment and “business middle stage” the other. Is there any difference between the two.

Indeed, zhongtai is the general term for all zhongtai concepts, and business Zhongtai is just one of them. The common mid-stage is as follows:

Business center: Common businesses in e-commerce business include payment center, commodity center, order center, member center, etc
Technical platform: message queues, technical frameworks, container clouds, Devops platforms
Data center: Data modeling, log analysis, user portrait
Algorithm center: recommendation algorithm, image recognition, speech recognition, search algorithm

In a broader definition, there are organizational centers like enterprise internal resource scheduling centers and internal innovation incubation centers, and advertising centers that manage corporate advertising. So in the perception of the middle stage, we should pay more attention to its reuse.

Second, the value of the Central Taiwan

The value of the center is not as direct as other businesses. The value of the front desk is to let more users use it, and the value of the back desk is to provide support for the front desk. The middle stage is more awkward, its value only raises effect.

If a middle stage is not done well, not only will not improve efficiency, but also may hinder the development of the business

2.1 instance

In many articles, jack Ma, the former CEO of Alibaba, visited Finland’s game company SpuerCell and found that the company, with less than 300 employees, had produced more than 10 games in just a few years. Clash of Clans, Clash Royale, Boom Beach came from this company, and most of the other games were cut in half through trial and error. And this small company is so efficient because of the Taiwan.

Readers who are familiar with all three games will notice that they are pretty much the same except for the UI model. These include payment systems, user systems, game engines, and so on. When all this is provided by a strong central platform, there is much less to develop.

SuperCell not only uses the mid-stage structure in technology and business, but also in organizational form. Closely followed, the domestic Internet also began their own strategy in Taiwan. More well-known is Alibaba’s “big medium platform, small front desk” strategy and Huawei’s “platform artillery support elite combat” strategy.

2.2 Problems in business development

Before discussing the middle stage, we need to understand that the emergence of the middle stage is not to solve the problems of the business itself, nor will it make our work easier. On the contrary, only the front and back stage is the most simple and labor-saving. The presence of the center also added additional construction work. So in the development of business, the emergence of Taiwan is to solve what problems?

Let’s assume the following scenarios:

The company’s business is e-commerce, just after the Double 12, marketing activities offline, the Chinese New Year is coming, we will do a New Year sales promotion marketing activities. If the end of January Chinese New Year, deducting the activities of a few days after the Double Twelve activities cleaned up, before the Chinese New Year activities warm up. With less than 30 days left, it is far from enough for a marketing campaign to go from design to development and testing to launch.
The business of the company is the Internet of things, and it makes profits by selling hardware products like modules online. Later, it finds that the value of data generated during the use of hardware is greater, so it needs to provide service products for the use of hardware. For hardware goods, a set of goods, payment, order, membership system has been built. For service goods, except for some differences in the data model of goods and orders, other differences are not big.
The company has multiple business lines selling cola. In line A, A group of Cola is 2 * 3 bottles, and A dozen of cola (12 bottles) is 2 groups of 2. In line B, there is no group. A dozen (12 bottles) is 3 × 4 bottles. In line A, they may sell one group at A time, or A dozen at A time. Line B can only sell a dozen at a time. Now the company has to count how many coke bottles it sold.

In the first scenario, similar services that have already been done need to be completed again in a short period of time. For this problem, in the absence of major changes in the activity rules, except for UI design and front-end workload is irreducible, all other work is repetitive. Users who have participated in taobao’s 618 annual promotion and Taobao’s 11th Annual Promotion in the past two years will find little difference in the rules of building buildings, small trains and folding cats. But any activity from zero development, you have to complete the development of UI, gold, upgrade, multi-app, and background brush, password, concurrency, messaging. The workload is unimaginable.

In the second scenario, there is a typical problem of repetitive work. Faced with two products with little difference, there is a lot of repetitive work to build a complete e-commerce process.

In the third scenario, it is easy to overlook the problem that there are two or more sales specifications for the same product. If we need to count the sales quantity of coke in the later stage, we need to treat it specially. You should know that this product is distributed in two different systems, and their product IDS will be different, and the CODE of sales specifications may also be different. What if there is more than one item of this specification? If Sprite and Cola need to be combined to sell in two business lines, do the projects of both business lines need to be modified?

The problem of these three scenarios can be regarded as the problem of repeating the wheel.

Similar marketing campaign, similar e-commerce system, repeated specification design (the key is also different design)

2.3 How did zhongtai solve this problem

See this place, has been emphasizing a feature of Taiwan, that is reuse. To solve the above problems, it is also by reuse.

Scenario 1, marketing campaigns for the same purpose, they actually have a lot in common. In taobao’s marketing campaign, for example, users obtain gold coins in various ways, which can be used to upgrade and redeem red packets. This process just runs through the whole marketing campaign, folding cats and trains are just different ways to collect gold coins, UI is different, and the rules of getting red packets are changed. So when the next activity comes along, in addition to the main process, make a change and go live quickly. The scenario 2 example is similar to this one.

The perspective of scenario 3 is changed, because two business systems are in operation and goods are managed in different systems, which leads to different data specifications and dimensions. If this is involved in the middle, you need to manage the model of the product in the middle, but also to provide specifications management. In this way, no matter how many specifications there are, they all calculate goods in the same dimension, and there will be no problem.

The role of the center is as follows:

Third, how to build the Central Taiwan

The middle stage construction here mainly refers to the business middle stage, because the technical middle stage is actually very easy to decouple from the business, and the relationship between front-end development is not so close.

3.1 The big picture of Zhongtai

In Taiwan’s business products and other products are larger differences. Take other types of products as an example, to make an e-commerce system, the product should first design the interactive page of the front mall, the types of goods to be sold, the list to be displayed, the payment process, and the shelves and shelves of goods in the background, etc. Each step is targeted at the user’s needs, prompting the user to complete a closed loop of behavior, from point to point design.

The same cannot be said of product design in Taiwan, which needs to consider the company’s structure, business development, general business design, and even product managers to know some technology.

Similarly, taking e-commerce as an example, the purpose of building a middle platform for e-commerce is to start faster when opening new business lines. Then it is necessary to put the duplicated parts in the center of centralized management. The common ones are commodity center, order center, payment center and membership center. One thing to note here is that the central platform does not come out of thin air, but based on the existing business, and the prospect of the future business, that is to say, the central platform is dynamic.

At the beginning, the company was just starting, so it was enough to meet the needs of the front desk business with the product model and order model. Later, the gradual development opened new business lines. If they are similar to the relationship between Taobao and Tmall, they will not have a great impact on the existing middle stage. It is good to have a set of models at the bottom and business compatibility at the top. If the relationship of similar industrial chain, Taobao and rookie this, have to consider, whether Taiwan support. It’s a general and growing concern for the business, and before you do that, you need to know where the company is going, and you need to plan ahead. The development direction of the company is closely related to the structure of the company. For example, when jingdong e-commerce developed its own logistics, jingdong Logistics was already in the structure of the company. After Alibaba purchased logistics companies on Taobao and Tmall, it also established Cainiao.

This can be seen, Taiwan products on the product experience, ability requirements are very high. Some people also call products CEO training courses.

3.2 Abstraction of the business model

In the big picture of the central Taiwan, tell us the direction of the central Taiwan, know what to do. This section discusses how we do the mid-stage design.

Foreground system and background management system are certain similarities, because its role is to manage data, but this data will be used for different business. Take goods as an example, when we do backstage management of goods, we will consider commodity center, commodity sorting rules, page path, commodity details, commodity operation.

After such a design, in line with the needs of the front desk. But some of that logic doesn’t necessarily work in other businesses. For example, sorting rules and page paths, it is normal for two businesses to have different sorting and path requirements for items.

And what’s left, beyond the logic that specialises, is what’s specific to the commodity. That is commodity center, commodity detail, commodity operation.

Now, one might ask, what’s the rule for sorting? Divergent thinking, in addition to goods, there may be other need to sort, such as advertising, banner. Therefore, we can also make a showcase for sorting problems.

This is the abstraction of the business model, the abstraction of reusable parts that cannot be smaller.

In addition to the business model abstraction approach, generic extraction can also be used to find reusable modules. See references

3.3 Service Boundaries

From business model abstraction, we know how to abstract a business into a mid-stage business. In the specific work, in the face of so many businesses, is it necessary to centralize them? The answer, of course, is no. It’s hard to be universal. Then it is necessary to identify which business should be in Taiwan, delimit the business boundary in Taiwan.

Before we talk about boundaries, we need to discuss the value of the business. How do you measure the value of a business? The most direct way is the revenue generated by the business. The value of the front desk is very direct. When users use it, they will consume. The larger the user base is, the greater the business value is generally generated.

Take the education platform as an example. The purpose of users is to learn. If the platform first introduces video classes, live classes and notes, users will use them more and more. If each course has only one document for users to learn, but vigorously develop membership systems, marketing campaigns, advertising and other functions. Seems to have been increasing revenue, in fact, users will slowly lose, but the loss is outweighed by the gain. So at this time, in the foreground function development, users will choose the more needed function development.

The same is true in midstage, except that users become colleagues of the business and value shifts from profitability to efficiency. In fact, the value brought by improving efficiency can also be estimated as profits to judge the benefits brought by the centralization of Taiwan. The calculation method is probably to judge whether the labor cost before the centralization of Taiwan – the labor cost after the centralization of Taiwan > the labor cost input of the centralization of Taiwan is established. If hold water, show in Taiwan change is worth.

The following is the business boundary text

In our daily work, we will find that not all business will be used. Typically, 80% of the business uses only 20% of the functionality. To know the use of this situation is only now, want to change, but also to consider the company’s next step strategy. Therefore, we need to focus on the core business.

After defining the core business, one thing needs to be done is the standardization of business processes, referred to as SOP (Standard Operating Procedure), which describes the Standard operation steps and requirements of an event in a unified format to guide and standardize daily work.

Assuming that there is no SOP, the merchandising process of A business line is new merchandising -> merchandising, and that of B business line is new merchandising -> configuration price -> Merchandising. The price of the commodity of line A is filled in the commodity, and the commodity of line B is configured in the price system. The problem comes when companies need to collect sales data, when they need to manage prices uniformly.

So what should SOP do? In our daily work, we will work according to the business process, and this is workflow. In this process, data is generated, there is information flow, and this is information flow. The scope of the SOP is the processing of workflow and information flow. It can be understood as:

SOP = workflow + information flowCopy the code

Again, the example of e-commerce is used to comb SOP:

1) Workflow acquisition

This is a key process from new products to shelves. The data generated during this period is as follows

2) Access to information flow

When we sort out the information flows and workflows in different business lines, we can see which parts of the business lines overlap and extract them into the middle stage.

Fourth, the misunderstanding of the Central Taiwan

1. All enterprises need middle stage

The value of a midstage is to improve the efficiency of the business. In smaller companies, rapid iterative development is the most important thing, and midstage is not necessary. In addition, the center also pays attention to a reuse, for innovative business, they have to do is different from the existing, is a process of creation, the center is to use the existing process. Therefore, the middle stage is not suitable for innovation business. Of course, there may be other scenarios that don’t apply. Therefore, not all enterprises need to consider according to their own situation.

2. Service Center = Center?

Service center refers to that we extract a certain service that has the same or similar demand from multiple business lines within the company as a public service and open it to different business lines, such as commodity center and price center. The meaning of the center is a bit broader, it can be seen as a collection of service centers. Generally speaking, a company will only have one middle stage.

The lame center stage

Some mid-platform schemes only provide data read and write interfaces without a universal access scheme. Still take goods as an example, the user wants to access the central Taiwan, probably to solve the following problems:

Whether data transfer can be accomplished with few interfaces using commodity related functions. The SKU, price, and release of the product are all managed and don’t need to be developed again
Is the docking cost less than the development cost
It is fully functional and capable of the current business scenarios

At least if these problems are resolved, the value of the centre will be felt.

4. Part-time construction team in Central Taiwan

Midstage iterations are also influenced by lines of business, and problems can occur if you have a part-time midstage team. For example, for both lines of business, there are modifications to the model of zhongtai, because zhongtai is building in one team, it is more likely to give priority to its own team. If other teams have similar needs in the future, they will need to force the current medium design, or they will need to reinvent it. The commonality of the middle stage may slowly decrease with business iteration.

Five, front end and middle stage

Here really have to admit a fact, that is, in the middle of the project, the front and the middle of the connection is the most shallow. In the process of SOP, the center considers the reuse of process and information. In fact, front-end reuse has a great limitation, that is, the reuse of components, components are the most important embodiment of interaction and data structure. If the interaction is not reusable, then the component needs to do a lot of work to adapt to the change. For the back end, the mid-stage is more valuable, a unified data model is more convenient for business development, and it becomes more valuable as the business becomes more complex.

As front-end development, if you want to go deeper into the middle stage, you can try to start with these three key words: micro front-end, business, data.

Micro front end: originally, it is a solution to achieve engineering split governance by using micro component splitting, which can solve problems such as engineering expansion and difficult development and maintenance. Its characteristics just coincide with the middle stage. The reusability of the mid-stage determines that its business comes from the line of business and is divided into modules. These modules can’t be too complicated to relate to each other, so it can be distributed across different systems. The use of a micro front end to develop mid-stage, is the best.

Business: The business of zhongtai is related to each line of business connected to zhongtai. To better understand zhongtai, we need to understand the business of each line of business first. Otherwise, when you’re developing, you don’t know what’s going to happen. Compared with the back end, the front end is relatively weak in business. After data is submitted to the back end, the front end does not know the specific business process. This can only be more and back-end, product communication to make up for their own shortcomings.

Data: The data used by the front end is usually the interface provided by the back end, without an idea of the overall business model, which makes it difficult to estimate the cost of a data model change. Most of the front desk business is not complicated, the process is relatively clear, basically get the data to know the business. But in the middle (and in the background), when you create a product, it may need to go to several systems to synchronize various data, and there will be relationships between the data. Some data, you may not even know what it does. Take the commodity of ISS as an example, the commodity needs to be associated with a MATERIAL code, which will be associated with SAP material and finally the price of the material. If you don’t know what that number means, you haven’t answered the question of how the product is priced.

Six, summarized

Nor is the mid-platform structure a silver bullet that will not solve all the efficiency problems encountered. Whether the middle stage should be developed or combined with the actual situation of the company’s business and development. Understand the business in Taiwan, to the front end, is to change a point of view. I always focus on what technology to use and what problem to solve, but I don’t pay attention to the value that solving this problem will bring. In particular, the value of the problem solved is indirect. By putting product thinking into work, we can find the value of business and put forward more constructive suggestions.

As a result of my experience in the development of Taiwan has yet to be accumulated, so some of the views of the above content come from the following article. You can read it carefully if you are interested.

reference

1. Practice of Product manager in Taiwan (Series of articles)

2, Internet companies in the so-called medium is how to define?

3. Comics: What is Zhongtai?

4, about the depth of thinking and combat in Taiwan

Come doodle work: job.tuya.com/

Business center and front end