Be Flexible with Autonomous Agents

Information technology was invented to compute and hence the focus of the computer lanugage design was to express the problem more succintly on a host computer. But Primary purpose of enterprise software is now shifting from computation to implementing systems to coordinate people, devices and/or other organizations. The change in purpose of these business process IT systems, from computation to creation of secure systems of record and systems of engagement calls for new approaches to software. Autonomous Agent technology, repurposes information technology from the current computation primitves to communication primitives. This make IT systems more responsive to change in entperprise and will signficantly improve Business - IT Alignment.

This can be illustrated with an sample business process i.e. Leave Management Process. A typical Leave management process consists of 4 external observations or business touch-points. The leave entry, Leave approval (Approve Deny), Notifying HR of approval and notify employee in case it is denied. These observations appear depending on the role each person plays in the organization. For example, Leave entry applies for all employees and approval appears only in the manager role and HR screen only if the person is playing a HR Role. For example, the leave entry is persistently available. These persistent observations repeat till it is turned off.

These persistent observations are created by packing these repeatable services as agents and then triggering these agents recursively. Depending on the type of roles, the appropriate agents are triggered in different user spaces. For example, if the user is an employee, then leave entry agent is triggered persistently when the user is created. If the user is an approver, then Approval Agent is turned on when the approver is created. Similarly, the HR agent is turned on when HR user is created.

Autonomous Agents, makes software simpler and flexible as "Exception Management" , "Concurrency Management" and "Storage Management" are completely eliminated. With Agent technology, it is now possible to deliver same functionality with less lines of code, significantly reducing effort and increasing quality of information system.