Chapter 11 evolution and future of Zhongtai

After Ali officially put forward the Strategy of Zhongtai in 2015, Zhongtai began to play a very important role in the process of enterprise digitization. With the continuous input of the front desk business, the rapid development of Taiwan. However, just as the so-called “a thousand readers have a thousand Hamlets”, the current construction and evolution of various enterprises in the Middle of the Taiwan vary.

In Taiwan as a double-edged sword, good use can make the enterprise number intelligence to a higher level, bad use will produce bad marketing to the development of the enterprise’s own organization business. So for enterprises, how to use this sword, through the evolution of Taiwan to meet and promote the development of enterprise business, is a topic worth pondering. Based on this topic, this chapter will analyze some existing wrong construction directions of Zhongtai, and then introduce the correct evolution route of Zhongtai, and finally guide enterprises to better build Zhongtai and promote the transformation of enterprise digitalization.

11.1 None of these are medians

In the process of informatization for many years, enterprises have introduced or built several vertical IT systems or suites to solve specific business problems based on specific application scenarios. These individual systems or suites do not communicate with each other and share different service capabilities and data, forming a system chimney and data islands.

The enterprise’s smokestack IT architecture of business and data is the origin of the evolution of zhongtai. Zhongtai has experienced great promotion and preaching in the industry, and has brought dividends for some enterprises that are more perfect in informatization. However, as mentioned above, some enterprises are wandering at the bifurcated point of evolution. Due to various reasons, the so-called “mid-stage” they build only solves short-term problems in performance, expansion and other technical architectures, such as microsertization of single service and warehousing of data assets. And just to be clear, none of this is the center stage.

11.1.1 Microservitization is not the Central platform

General microservices in the traditional way of thinking is likely to be forced integration of previously isolated individual business systems through microservices, as shown in the figure below.

This approach is not domain-based, but rather builds microservices from a level of granularity within a system. For example, an order management system (OMS) focuses on members and orders, customer relationship management (CRM) on members and orders, and supply chain management (SCM) on users and orders. It can be seen that all components of the “Central Platform” constructed in this way are still overlapping with each other, and the data are repeated and inconsistent, which cannot reflect the core concept of “Central Platform as a capability sharing platform” ==. Therefore, only the original single business system for microservice encapsulation, covering a microservice shell, even the microservice is not counted, let alone can not be said to be the middle stage.

Some enterprises choose to implement microservitization within the scope of a certain business system (see the figure below). For example, OMS is divided into users, members and orders, and CRM into members, orders and points. From a single application domain perspective, this is fine. While using the micro service technical architecture can solve the problem of performance problems, horizontal extension, can give full play to the advantages of the service, but a global perspective, from the enterprise data still did not get through, have multiple users, multiple membership system, many orders data, such as chimney system still exists, so this is not China, not the right direction.

China it will be applied to micro service, on the basis of vertical separation and horizontal segmentation, sharing ability is separated from the upper application, the formation of reusable sharing service layer, thereby promoting the business and data in cross Shared among different applications, greatly reduce the repetitive construction and investment, it also contributed to China to share ideas, make China far beyond the service category.

11.1.2 Data warehouse is not midstage

Enterprises pay more and more attention to data assets, data analysis and data operation are put on the agenda, and data warehouse specifications and technologies are becoming more mature, so enterprises begin to build their own data warehouse with operation analysis as the main purpose. In the process of construction, the enterprise will sort the business blocks from the bottom up, classify the data of each business block, and construct the data warehouse according to the specifications. In China, especially the data in the process of the evolution of China, some companies focus on the set of data assets, using the methodology of dimensional modeling abstracts the general dimension and measure from the business process, composition data model, which provide general ability of data analysis for decision analysis, scenario analysis report to satisfy the business enterprise data. These enterprises refer to this data model as the “data midpoint.”

But that’s not the whole story of the data center. Compared with data warehouse, DATA Center lays more emphasis on data businessization, planning enterprise data assets from the perspective of service business, managing data assets from the perspective of operation, and serving business with real-time and intelligent data application. The application of data not only serves for enterprise data analysis, but also actively caters to business, sorting out business scenarios that need data to empower and form business closed loop.

To sum up, data warehouse only solves the problem of how to view data, while data Center carries out more comprehensive planning and uses the characteristics of big data and AI to solve a series of problems such as business insight, accurate decision making and application intelligence.

11.2 The evolutionary path of the middle stage

The Central Taiwan has grown up gradually. In the process of building the middle stage, enterprises should avoid going in the wrong direction. So how should the center evolve?

We divide the evolution of the middle platform into four stages: 0.5, 1.0, 2.0, and 3.0, as shown in the figure below.

11.2.1 Phase I: Domain microservitization

Domain microservitization is the separation of application capability domains according to selected application scenarios. The middle platform is for business services, but enterprises will have a point of entry and construction cycle in the construction of the middle platform. For example, enterprises take digital marketing as the entry point of digital-intelligence transformation. In order to support digital marketing, some enterprises will do membership-related fields, while others will choose e-commerce related fields. However, such a middle platform cannot form a closed loop from marketing, transaction to service. Therefore, it is only the prototype of the business center, which we call Center 0.5.

In stage 0.5, domain microservitization focuses on the accumulation of sharing capabilities. As mentioned above, some companies use membership as the entry point and focus on the membership scenario. At the beginning, the member domain only has the basic member management ability and can only complete the basic business closed loop. But with the deepening of the business, it will continue to precipitate the member system, member rights and interests, and the ability of refined management of b-end and C-end members. Thus it can be seen that the process of capacity precipitation of domain scene is also the process of self-evolution of middle stage. Generally speaking, Taiwan 0.5 can evolve from depth and breadth.

In terms of depth, in the process of supporting the upper business, the middle-taiwan team constantly precipitates new business capabilities with the continuous input of different business scenarios, which enriches the capabilities of each capability center. Breadth means that the center will cover more and more fields. If a new field is relatively independent from the existing capacity center, it will be built into a new capacity center, which is also the construction and strengthening of the Center.

11.2.2 Stage 2: Service or data center

With the improvement of the depth and breadth of the field, the coverage of the middle stage scene to enterprise business is constantly expanded, and the closed loop oriented to digital marketing is finally formed. At this time, the middle stage business grows to 1.0. At this stage, the central station focuses on solving the problem of global closed-loop scenarios. On the one hand, zhongtai pays attention to the general ability of the whole scene, on the other hand, it also pays attention to the ability series of different scenes. On the basis of the previously precipitated capabilities, the corresponding domain model is abstracted, so that the general domain capabilities can meet more business scenarios. At the same time, in order to create a panoramic closed loop of business, domains need to collaborate with each other. Here, on the one hand, hierarchical relationships between domains will be formed, and on the other hand, high cohesion and low coupling middle-taiwan capabilities will be further built, so that capabilities are related but not strongly coupled. This phase, we call business Medium 1.0.

At the same time, due to the enterprise phase selection, there will also be data medias in phase 1.0. Some enterprises think it is also a good choice because of the high complexity of their own business and the large workload and long cycle of reconstructing the existing business. However, the single data construction in Taiwan is highly independent and does not affect the existing business. However, starting from the data center, it is necessary to integrate different data sources and inconsistent and irregular data, and the workload is also large. In the process of middle construction data, though is likely to tease out some of the existing business system construction is not reasonable place, reversed transmission business system reform, to a certain extent, promote the development of the business system, but China data to data capacity and business form closed loop, will greatly limit the data middle value.

The above two forms, the business center or data center constructed separately, are only one leg of the enabling business of the center, so it is collectively called the Center 1.0.

11.2.3 Stage 3: Service medium + data medium

Zhongtai 1.0 belongs to walking on one leg, but in order to promote the construction of enterprise digital intelligence to go faster, more stable and better, we need to use both legs. Thus Came Zhongtai 2.0.

Business data, data business, with business and data double center drive front-end business, this is the most important feature of Center 2.0. It not only focuses on the internal series opening of the single form of central platform, but also further opens up the capacity between the double central platform while building the double central platform, and the two cooperate and support each other. The construction of dual business and data center focuses on business and builds business and data series capabilities around innovation, so as to quickly meet the closed-loop of business scenarios and business innovation attempts.

Take marketing activities as an example, there is no data center, can not circle the right people; There is no business center, can not design appropriate promotion activities, can not drive the transaction; Without activity and transaction data, you can’t find the right people. Therefore, in enterprises where innovation may occur at any time, we must always keep business and data on standby in Taiwan. It is recommended to integrate into the integration planning and implementation, so as to achieve the 2.0 stage of Construction in Taiwan.

After China Central Taiwan 2.0, China Central Taiwan will naturally evolve to 3.0.

11.3 The future of CTC: Software defines CTC

In order to give full play to the role of THE central platform as an enterprise business capability and data sharing service platform, enterprises need to find a better way to build the central platform on the basis of the Central Platform 2.0 for business and data. The software definition of China Platform is our vision and planning for China Platform 3.0. == Software definition Central Platform clearly proposes to build a closed loop between business central platform and data central platform supported by the technical platform, decouple the operation plane, control plane and execution plane, and realize the unified operation, centralized control and flexible execution of central platform. == Software-based definition of ZHONGtai will promote the platform, collaboration, intelligence, professionalism and ecology of Zhongtai.

1. The platform

In the evolution of Zhongtai, if the field microservitization is a quantitative change, then the platformization is a qualitative change. Through the platform, business abstract modeling is continuously carried out to support multi-scene business process orchestration, so that the general business capabilities can be combined with specific business rules and flexible orchestration of processes to meet more and more complex business scenarios. In the process of domain microservitization, every capability added is a zero-to-one process. However, through platformization, a new scene or capability can be continuously extended on the basis of the original capabilities and scenarios, improve the speed of ITERATION of THE MEDIUM platform, and make the medium platform capabilities more flexible and richer. The idea of platform to precipitate the general business ability, can better support the business.

2., co-ordinated

Synergy focuses on the mechanism of multi-party cooperation and construction of the middle stage. All business parties can become participants in the process of capacity building and utilization. For example, you can view the business panorama through the mid-stage control state and perform specific isolation configuration for business rules. For example, in the process of business planning, if there is a business requirement that cannot be met by the existing capabilities or rules, the platform can provide an extension mechanism so that everyone can become a capability provider and more parties can participate in the collaborative construction of specific business capabilities or rules.

Intelligent 3.

As we all know, data is the soil of intelligence. At the present stage, the data center has only played less than five success force, and the future of the data center will be the site where data intelligence will prevail. With the arrival of 5G and industrial Internet era, data sources will become richer and more diversified, and the usage scenarios of data will become more and more diversified. The energy prize released by the data center increases exponentially. Specific performance in the following two aspects.

First, the construction of the data center will be more intelligent. The processing of data acquisition, storage, access and treatment will be greatly shortened. The data center itself will be more understanding of people, can automatically determine which data need to access, which data need to be discarded; The data center will be self-learning, timely diagnosis of data processing link faults and active repair.

Second, data intelligence applications will be everywhere, empowering marketing, channels, supply chains, services and other fields.

4. From where

A big message to an enterprise group may involve businesses of multiple industries. For example, an enterprise is not only involved in the real estate business, but also in the cultural tourism and other forms of business, and may also participate in the development of new energy vehicles. First of all, different industries will focus on different areas of development. The real estate industry pays much attention to the management of clue opportunities, so the clue field is the general domain center of the real estate industry. In the automobile industry, in addition to the normal transaction links, consumers also have a strong demand for after-sales service. Therefore, after-sales service is its core domain in the automobile industry. Secondly, different industries will have different business needs when playing the same ability center. For example, in the real estate industry, commodity centers are not only used for online commodity purchase, but also need to be linked to specific projects under construction. Therefore, on the basis of the general commodity center, it is necessary to expand the business capacity of commodity projects and form commodity centers with real estate industry characteristics. In order to support the business of the whole enterprise, the characteristics of different industries should not be entangled together, and the characteristics of various industries should be managed in a unified and isolated way from the perspective of professionalism.

5. Ecological

The core of Zhongtai lies in sharing. From the beginning, the sharing of various businesses within the enterprise gradually evolved into the sharing of the industry ecology, and then formed the capability ecology. In the ecological stage, enterprises based on ecological empowerment, help other enterprises to quickly innovate, and feed themselves. Therefore, ecologicalization can be embodied through capability map, application market, open platform and other mechanisms. Open platforms help expand the boundaries of an enterprise’s business.

It takes a long time for anything new to be born, widely accepted and applied to practice, and then promoted globally. It will go through challenges and doubts. Similarly, Taiwan from the birth to thrive in the process of avoiding all aspects of the adjustment.

First of all, although the name of the central Taiwan, but its precise definition is still in the stage of chaos. Therefore, the first chapter begins to point out that digital Platform is a continuously evolving enterprise-level business capability and data sharing service platform based on cloud computing, big data, artificial intelligence and other new generation technologies

Secondly, the informatization construction of various enterprises is uneven, with different focal points and entry points, leading to certain differences in the direction of construction of the middle stage. For example, the 㐇 construction of some enterprises still put the main energy on the construction of data warehouse, and the operation of the data center organization has not yet formed, naturally unable to realize the value of the data center. In addition, some say that the central government is useless. In fact, this is not useless, but the construction of enterprises in Taiwan may not be the right conditions. Of course, the Central Taiwan itself is evolving.

The center is put forward to better serve the business of enterprises and facilitate the rapid innovation of enterprises. In the process of the evolution of Zhongtai, business iteration and trial and error are constantly carried out to put forward more challenges to Zhongtai and build it into a new infrastructure for enterprises in the era of digital intelligence. The center can effectively integrate enterprise digital capability resources, build a closed loop of enterprise business and data, improve enterprise business innovation, support the original application fast four transplantation, and promote enterprise organization evolution. Therefore, digital zhongtai will greatly promote the transformation of digital intelligence of enterprises. With the development of the middle stage, the digital middle stage will gradually evolve from the front stage, the middle stage, the middle stage of the background into the middle stage of the enterprise center.