One Solution to Rule Them All

Point solutions, HR, sales, ticketing, even ERP is almost worthless without integration, and you don’t want to integrate

Introduction

Normally we talk about health care and health insurance in this space, but today is a little different.  Today we are going to discuss the trend of installing point solutions like Workday, ServiceNow, SalesForce and even SAP, why that is wrong and what business, even big banks and insurance companies should be thinking about and doing better.

The Situation

Almost all companies, big, small and indifferent, run the exact same way.  They have various departments that have some point solution that makes life easier for them but amazingly difficult for everyone else.  These various systems are written in different languages, in different ways, and the only way to make them talk is to hire a team of developers to query the databases directly (usually the way and amazingly bad idea) or use a built in Application Programming Interface (API).  Either of these ways requires developers, time and a lot of cash to implement.    

The Logical Conclusion

Just about everyone is doing just about everything the same way Bob Cratchit did in 1842: Filling out spreadsheets and schlepping them around.  This is exactly the same monkey motion that goes on in corporate America still, today.  Sure HR gets to sit around and look important and not do much of anything because their Applicant Tracking System (ATS) makes candidates attach a resume and then type it in again anyway.  They can request a virtual interview where the candidate talks to AI and subsequently gets evaluated for buzzwords they (didn’t) say.  Training is done via a Learning Management System (LMS).  What exactly does an HR “professional” do?  I digress.  The point is that anything that is in HR stays in HR.  you can’t use HR’s data without asking them for it and then they ship over whatever it is you need in a spreadsheet via email.

The same problem exists in accounting, supply chain, manufacturing, accounting and every other department in the enterprise.  The natural outcome of all this is that necessary data is locked away in a silo and only available via a personal request and when that manual  request is made it is fulfilled manually and it is prone to errors and about as insecure as it is possible to be.  

Next, this kind of thinking limits either the size of the organization or the profitability.  You can only do so much work manually.  When you hire more people to get more work done, you have to train them, pay them, supply them with benefits, arrange for time off, do the HR and accounting work, and all the things necessary.. So either you don’t hire and you don’t grow or you hire and have all the associated work and costs and run into diminishing returns. You have to hire more managers to guide, direct and motivate the new employees.  Either you start losing money, or you raise prices and maybe price yourself out of the market.  

Finally, none of that takes into account having to have your own developers to finish these half baked applications nor the infrastructure and administration necessary to run them.  

The Solution

Get rid of the silos.  Get rid of the consulting companies and their insistence that you buy and install and pay for SalesForce, ServiceNow, Workday/iCIMS/Taleo, SAP/Netsuite/Automatica.  If you are going to have to have developers and network guys and security guys and CI/CD guys and project managers and business analysts and testers and all the things you need to make these Computer Off The Shelf (COTS) applications work, why not just build it yourself?

Development Staff

The people who run the companies that write the COTS applications listed above aren’t any better or know any more than you.  The developers they hire aren’t any better either.  The people who run the companies that sell these trainwrecks are there to extract your money and don’t know anything you don’t.  In fact they don’t have the faintest clue how to write software, they hire that out, just like you can do.  So write it yourself.  Hire a trusted architect and let her or him build a team that can get the job done.    

Ask a potential architect what problems they have solved, what mistakes they have made and what they learned from them. Ask them what tools they chose and why they chose them.  Armed with this knowledge you will probably make better decisions than your counterparts at SalesForce.  Beware of open source.  It is generally free and worth every penny.  Developing in open source smacks of academic-only knowledge and a lack of understanding of the risks.

Speaking of risks, with open source, you are one malicious check-in away from having a backdoor into your system.  A malicious developer checks out the source code, adds the back door and checks in his changes and unless someone is paying very close attention, you have a problem.  

Your Problem

You ask all the right questions and hire an architect and let him or her pick out a team.  They do badly.  At the very least you know what they screwed up and why.  Maybe that screw up is a bad solution to a particularly sticky problem that you wouldn’t have been able to solve any other way.  My point is that it is YOUR bad solution and you know how to mitigate it.

One Solution to Rule them All

It would certainly be nice to not have to hire a bunch of guys to maintain and integrate someone else’s application.  That is kind of like having to take over the old guy’s job at a new company.  After he says about 400 times “We aren’t supposed to do this, but I…” you know you are in deep.  A piece of advice I adhere to is “never take over someone else's project.”

So you roll your own.  Instead of hiring a bunch of developers to install, modify and maintain someone else’s project, you use the same guys to design and build your own.  It may take a little long, but it may not as well.  If your architect is worth his salt, s/he can streamline and automate processes as s/he goes.  That increases productivity immediately and doesn't require extra steps in the software to compensate for badly designed processes.  

Be sure you are doing the streamlining and automating analysis up front before a single line of code is typed.  Let the architect go over everything you do, step by step and you will be amazed at the wasted effort and s/he will just laugh at you, in a good way.

We here at Sentia use a couple of applications that we designed and built and that are suitable for reuse.  Let’s talk about those below, as examples.

Master Data Management (MDM)

The MDM is the repository of  all enterprise information.  People and places and companies and employees and everything that will be needed in more than one spot.  The MDM approach obviates the need for copying and pasting data and maintaining versioning.  This is something that nobody talks about with integration.  If you change integrated data, you have to decide where the source of truth for that data lives and you have to update it  when it changes in every instance where it occurs.  MDM eliminates that.  This is the first step in eliminating silos.

Single Sign On (SSO)

Another problem you have with buying three million little point solutions is security.  You have no centralized repository of truth for Authentication and Authorization (Auth).  Every little point solution has its own login and own security schema.  You don’t know how their security works and you probably don’t want to know.  SSO is one of our predesigned and built applications that manages all that in one place.  Notice that the User in SSO is the same as the Person in MDM, with a link between the two.  This kind of flexibility allows a user to also be a client.  This is where we maintain users and groups and passwords and so on.

Security

SSO sounds like a great solution for security but there is more to consider.  Every layer of your application has to be secured.  SSO will tell you that the user is who s/he says s/he is, but that only works at the procedural layer.  It also depends on a bearer token.  After authentication, as long as you have that token you are automatically granted access. We take that a step further.  What if you have a bad actor on your network?  They didn’t go through SSO to get to whatever data you have.  We solve this problem by issuing a Globally Unique Identifier (GUID) that the calling application has to present to the database server to retrieve any data.  This GUID is unique in the universe, unique to the application and issued new with every session.  It is reissued every 20 minutes and every time the application is switched.  It is checked with every call to the database.  I could literally give you the generic database username and password for any of the databases in one of our applications and you could still not get any data without that system issued GUID.

Multitenancy

We put all our clients in one database.  Let’s say we have 100 clients for the sake of argument.  This makes development and administration 1/100th easier, and therefore 1/100th cheaper, and 1/100th more robust since we can do all our testing on one application before deployment.  The GUID discussed above is the basis for this multitenancy.  This is unique in the industry and works amazingly well.  We won’t go into the specifics, but we call this Relational Multitenancy and it is designed to make systems secure, cheap and maintainable.  No, you will never be able to see another tenant's data, and they can’t see yours.  This also allows us to fine tune performance since there is only one database per client application.

Integration

If your business runs on a single suite of applications you do not need to integrate.  All the people you would have hired to make a bunch of point solutions can write bespoke software to automate almost every facet of your business.  Imagine being able to run a P&L with the click of a mouse.  Imaging running a P&L on any employee, piece of equipment, consumable, facility or the entire enterprise.  That is what a custom designed application gets you if you do it as we have discussed.  

Audit

We build in triggers for every table that writes an audit log for every data change.  You can see who made the change and why, and what the old data is. That makes malicious actors or just mistakes easy to compensate for, and of course, auditing is a breeze.  

Single Source of Truth

You don’t have to worry about data silos and versioning, you know exactly where the data you need is and it is already integrated into all the applications necessary to run your company.

Enterprise Logging

Centralized logging is part and parcel of any application that we build.  We store the logs in a document database so we can search by application, time of any number of other parameters.  This makes the administration and error tracking to resolve issues near seamless.

Sure, but I can do all that with AI

No, no you cannot.  First, there are no examples of enterprise, “one app to rule them all” to train AI from unless we at Sentia have published it.  We don’t publish our code to the internet.  Second, no AI generated application is enterprise ready with logging and security and some of the most powerful features of our architecture are unique to us.  So no, you can’t integrate with AI and you can’t have AI build a single solution application.  

Conclusions

You can buy all the point solutions you like for your business, but you are still doing the same old thing that our buddy Bob Cratchit did in 1842: schlepping spreadsheets.  Really, that is how insurance was tracked in London at Lloyd’s four hundred years earlier. Do you really want to continue to run your business with manual processes and emailing spreadsheets and TPS reports that take weeks to produce, or would you rather spend the same money on bespoke software that you control and that does exactly what you want it to do and nothing else?

We have laid out a plan to replace all the expensive, fragile, half baked point quick fixes with a single solution that is enterprise ready, robust, secure and fault tolerant.  We have automated the process of producing these applications with a little tool that  I personally wrote that generates all of the architecture and about half the code for an application.

If we can automate what we do, we can automate what you do.

We can show you what to do and how to do it with your developers, we can answer questions, we can do anything in between like provide developers to train your guys or do the entire project for  you.  We aren’t all that interested in the money.  We have built the better mousetrap.  We just want to help businesses streamline and automate.

If you liked what you read contact us here, on our site, SentiaHealth.com, our parent company SentiaSystems.com, or send us an email to info@sentiasystems.com or info@sentiahealth.com