Center-out: Connecting down to systems

Insulate business logic from the complexity of back-end systems to access the right data for the job at hand. Even as technical processes change, business functions stay online, and are more efficient than ever, without redundant or irrelevant back-end input. The “live data” layer of Pega’s Center-out® architecture makes it possible. Don Schuerman explains how.

This is part 5 of the "Building a business architecture" video series. Watch part 6: “Managing variation in layers."

Transcript:

When you build a center of business architecture, you capture your logic, which connects your customers to the outcomes they run. In the center, you capture the business rules and you leverage AI to drive the next best action. You use case management to capture the stages and the steps of that customer micro-journey that you wanna drive to completion, and then you connect that all up to your channels in a way that ensures your channels don't have the logic embedded, but can dynamically change as the centralized logic changes.

But you also need to connect that down to the data that lives inside your systems so that you can automate those processes and drive the decisions based on everything that you know down here. In traditional approaches, you often do this by embedding the data lookup directly into your process. And this is really a bad idea because one, these end up not being that much business processes and more technology processes. It also leads to a lot of really bad behaviors like looking up the same piece of data multiple times or looking up data that you don't need. And every time you wanna make a change to your systems, you have to go in and change your business processes, which interrupts your employee and your customer experiences.

So instead of embedding all of your data lookup directly inside your processes, you want a virtualization layer. That insulates the complexity of your systems from your centrally-defined business logic. We call this virtualization layer live data. And what live data does is it takes all the data that's in your system and reflects it into the case in a business standard form. So things like customer or account or policy or transaction regardless of how the data is stored down here.

And regardless of whether or not I need to go to one system or three systems, or choose between a couple of systems in order to populate that data, the live data layer captures and manages all of that complexity. So your case and your business logic needs only to refer to that data in the business standardized form. And live data automatically pulls in the data just when the case needs it or when it can anticipate that the case will need it. So, you don't look up data unnecessarily and you don't get duplicative data lookups that can slow down your systems.

Siemens was able to drive incredible results by approaching their systems from the center out. They have processes that run across a variety of different backends supporting 45,000 users. And in part because they were able to use this live data layer to insulate those systems, they're able to operate at one 10th the cost and 10 times the speed. That's the power of working from the center out and insulating your business logic from the complexity of your underlying systems.