MIMOS’ take on business and IT integration

By Cat Yong

MIMOS was founded to be a strategic platform that would accelerate and support national objectives. Besides promoting home grown technologies and empowering the local industry, MIMOS also contributes by growing key economic sectors. According to Nagendran Perumal, Senior Director of MIMOS Berhad’s Software Development Lab, MIMOS also focuses on 4 verticals, namely government, education, healthcare, and agriculture. A 5th vertical; communications; cuts across the first 4.

Nagendran shared, “MIMOS has developed many platforms to solve specific business problems. These platforms are then put together to create frameworks.

“We look at various requirements to build business solutions and found that in order to develop any kind of software application, the basic architecture requires – integration bus (Enterprise Service Bus), security like authentication and authorisation, cloud and virtualisation, dashboarding and a rules engine that caters to business logic.”

As a result of MIMOS developing various IT frameworks to handle the various verticals, the organisation currently has defined and deployed Government 2.0 and Healthcare 2.0 frameworks, said Nagendran. He added, “These frameworks enable developers to build various business solutions and integrate them. The entire architecture is SOA-based and tightly coupled within the platform to ensure performance and robustness.”

The IT and business blueprint
“There are many tried and tested methodologies in software development like waterfall, Agile and so on. But, if the development team does not have a good solution architect that understands the business needs, then it becomes difficult to achieve the customers’ needs.

“The main benefit I perceive of enterprise architecture (EA), is that it looks at business requirements instead of just technical.”

Nagendran also went on to say that MIMOS ensures its business architecture is defined by a solution architect whose main perspective is that of the customers’ business needs. “This is done via a series of requirements-gathering activities and in an iterative manner.

“The business architecture plan and requirements are then shared with the technical architecture team, where the framework is defined using the platforms that have been developed.

In the senior director’s experience, the core competency for software companies must be in the area of business architecture, whereby the understanding of the business and domain expertise is required.

“The other core competency should be in project management. Many projects fail not because of technical reasons, but because many project managers focus on program management and not managing the project.”

Nagendran also shared that in order to establish a good understanding of EA, teams need to be trained on architecture principles that cover business, technical and application.