Every company is split into divisions, departments or groups such as sales, marketing, R&D, production and finance. 8Manage allows departmental projects and operations to function within the departmental silo so that people can be more independent, focused and proud of the ownership.

Departments also need to work together. But too often that doesn’t happen because people do not share the same information and priorities when they work in an independent, entrepreneurial manner – in short, when they operate with tower vision. This is further complicated by the fact that different silos will easily spawn different cultures and that will in turn increase territorialism among departments.

8Manage addresses the following key silo barriers:：

• Common objectives across departments
• Cause-and-effect relationships of deliveries and objectives in real-time

Given two people with the same level of intelligence, one is being able to see and the other unable to see cause-and-effect relationships of decisions, work and results will make the biggest difference in the effectiveness of their judgment. The timeliness of information is another major factor. This is analogous to one person using todays newspaper and another person using a 3-month-old newspaper as information source to invest in stocks in the stock market; the one who has more timely information will have a much higher chance to make better decisions.

The developers of 8Manage can capitalize on developers’ experience on the first generation of enterprise management software and come up with the new generation enterprise management software that has much higher data connectivity and information efficiency to support integrated management. The One Design One System (ODOS) approach is to design business functionality to work together from day one. But it does not preclude the use of Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) techniques in all cases; or the resulting solution must be one system. It emphasizes the importance of minimizing the number of systems that are not designed to work together as much as possible for efficiency and cost-saving reasons.

Commercial software does not have a very long history. Humans have only about 50 years of experience on developing commercial applications. Without the experience of enterprise management applications and EAI, it was not possible to use the ODOS approach to create 8Manage because developers lacked the experience and did not understand the interrelationships between the applications well enough to model them together. The other two important factors of making ODOS possible in 8Manage are:

• The willingness to give up old code from the first generation enterprise management applications (what should be capitalized is experience, not old code)
• The rapid software development skills to construct common modules and maximize their reuse Taking too long (e.g., over 10 years) to develop the needed modules for 8Manage not only is risky in running out of development funding but also the market may change

One of the biggest benefits for ODOS is economical from simplification. In the solution that consists of different systems linked together by EAI, many business elements, such as order, would have been duplicated and yet inconsistent across the different systems. This would create tremendous amount of inefficiencies during integration and when the data are accessed after integration. Duplicated and inconsistent data models also mean duplicated and inconsistent code, user interfaces, system flows and processing. If the different application systems were developed with different programming languages and running on different DBMS, middleware, OS and hardware, the cost would be even higher.

The clumsiness and inefficiency of the old approach came from human inexperience and limitations on older technology. However, the clumsiness and inefficiency would require the end users to consume more hardware, software and services and could in turn generate more business for systems integrators and hardware and software vendors. The efficiency in the new approach will enable the end users to consume less hardware, software and services and will benefit the buyers and end users.

System information efficiency refers to the effective connectivity of data in the system to support the interconnection, accuracy and agility of information in business processes. Data and information are disconnected because the related applications were modeled and designed in isolation. Information in end-to-end business processes is connected, accurate and agile because the underlying applications in the system were modeled and designed together to support them.

The benefits of system information efficiency (connectivity, accuracy and agility) is similar to the benefits in straight-through-processing in trading. Any data change in any segment of the end-to-end business process will be visible (via real-time dashboard and/or alert) to the relevant parties at the earliest possible time.

Silo applications, although they were integrated together using data mapping and EAI, and were linked together with their duplicated and inconsistent data models, code, user interfaces, system flows and processing, they were plugged in and connected together, but they were not designed to work together. Older applications typically are silos because human lacked of the experience of modeling and designing various application systems to work together to support end-to-end business processes. When silo applications were integrated using data mapping and EAI techniques, people were busy to deal with the complexity and clumsiness caused by the duplicated and inconsistent data models, code, user interfaces, system flows and processing and dared not demand for higher data connectivity and information efficiency.

Fortunately, human has gained enough experience by now and using ODOS approach to develop 8Manage is quite possible today.

Information connectivity, accuracy and agility affect judgment effectiveness. ODOS can aggregate data across groups, lines of business, products, services, channels, geographical locations and legal entities in real-time. People can be alerted on events or based on KPI at the earliest possible time and drill down to obtain the detailed information. ODOS is the dream performance management platform for the enterprises that need information to manage the performance across groups, lines of business, products, services, channels, geographical locations and legal entities.

The most important elements for a team are common objective and being able to see how its efforts and contributions affect the results. One Design One System provides connected, accurate and agile information to allow a team to see the relationship of each member’s efforts and contributions and the results. This will get the team to focus on results instead of politics.

8Manage modules such as CRM, SPM, PPM, Finance, HCM, OA, Manufacturing ERP2, O2O, BI and FAS can be combined in real-time to instantly function as an integrated management system. The fact that the modules require ZERO time to be combined together to function as an integrated whole is reflecting these modules weren’t designed separately and then linked together with EAI techniques. As a matter of fact, these modules were designed with the integrated model upfront and then implemented and rolled out separately by the same key designers and development team over a number of years.