On the concept of middle stage , Now it's rotten Street . Most people think that just a few microservices are a whole , Externally, it is called Zhongtai . But what exactly is midfield ？ What abilities do you need to have to do well in the middle stage ？ Today, let's talk about China and Taiwan , And take my ongoing knowledge management system , Evolve into a knowledge center , What kind of an idea , And long-term development , What does Zhongtai bring to enterprises .

1、 Introduction to Zhongtai

        It can be described in one sentence , For component reuse , It can also be called function reuse . And zoom in and say , In order to make the organization , resources , Ability , Business , And so on , precipitation , The reverse creates greater profits for the enterprise itself . Say small , Enterprises in each business line , In order to implement a business scenario , Will repeat a function , Repeated workload of development such as repeated design , And this effect may not be as good as that already realized , Of course, it doesn't necessarily mean that the existing ones are doing very well , It can meet the indicators used by each business line . for example ： An e-commerce company , All systems send messages to users , If each business line, such as payment , Order , purchase ,IC（ The middle of the market ）, members , If financial and other institutions have to send messages by themselves , The cost will be very high , Then there is a special system , Or a special functional component , To realize the function of business sending messages . So when these components , They are given one by one on a whole platform , Export his ability externally or internally to reduce repetitive work , What empowers the construction of enterprises , It's Zhongtai , What is emphasized here is “ Business Center ”  .

2、 What needs to be prepared for enterprise transformation

         Some people say , Microservices have solved this problem ？ If you don't have a deep understanding of Technology , It will definitely confuse Zhongtai with microservice , And will often follow some of the landing of the middle stage in no exaggeration anywhere , Most companies in the market will be unfamiliar with the real theory of Zhongtai and the guidance of the Emperor , As a result, many companies face various problems in transformation , Even if the cost is not enough , Lack of experience , The overall technical level of the company cannot be improved to a higher level , So every business line can't do such a thing , Even many companies have failed in transformation and collapsed . Most of the direct reasons are method errors , Old methods can't solve new problems , New methods should be used to solve old problems , because strategic 、 Zhongtai 、 personnel The disjointed led to failure , The strategy is to turn the decentralized problem of business into a problem that can be solved through the middle office ability ; Zhongtai is to integrate the public resources of enterprises , And open it up , Solve these business problems ; Talent is in the middle stage , Also know what the goal problem is , Then make clear what kind of organizational ability to use and what kind of talents to solve the problem .

        As soon as the concept of Zhongtai comes out , Then Ali published an article 《 Ali completely dismantled the middle stage 》, We have to deny that the leading companies of these technologies , In the process of fully realizing the transformation of China into Taiwan , Even after decades of practice , Also fell to pieces , I've had a big change of blood , Are moving in the direction of successful digital transformation , We as “ Follow suit ”, We should see the lessons of these transformation failures , Learn from and learn from experience , At least, , These enterprises are giants leading , Whether the business line and direction are the same or not , Most of the failure scenarios are consistent . Before Ali's China Taiwan strategy was put forward , It has been done. 7、8 Service oriented in 2000 , After the China Taiwan strategy was put forward , Again 5 The organization of the year 、 technology 、 Business level change . For ordinary companies, it is necessary to transform into Zhongtai , A stable road is indispensable , Special technical personnel are required , Need clear control of the business line , It is necessary to have a strategic positioning for the development direction of future modules , It's not an effect that can be achieved in a short time , Even if we achieve , It's not the middle stage , It's service centralization ; In the process of turning to the center stage , If the enterprise itself does not consider the issue of organizational capacity , Talk about function 、 Talk about architecture , Did not consider that the company should have diversified perspectives in the face of China Taiwan issues , The construction of collaborative talent system is not considered , It will lead to excessive demands on an organization , Talent didn't keep up , It will also cause transformation failure , All this needs to be considered .

3、 Why do you want to be a knowledge center

        Because every enterprise urgently needs to establish a new information and knowledge processing platform , Promote the transformation of data into knowledge by intelligent means , Support the rapid landing and iteration of enterprise innovative business . This is also a must for enterprises to transform to digital , To integrate these data , Numbers , Information , resources , To quickly form knowledge and data capabilities to serve the market .

        Nowadays, we face many problems in the process of realizing knowledge management , There is no lack of redundant construction , Low data utilization , Complex data form and application polymorphism , Massive data will be generated later , Data deconstruction and other problems need to be solved ;

• building redundant project ：

         From a technical point of view , Providing basic services to others api, Interface , Front and back end components are actually difficult to be used directly by other business modules , for example ： Diversity of business needs . When the caller's requirements are not clear , Due to fast delivery, we will output the required interface capabilities , Or component capabilities , Once other business lines find that this interface is not suitable for them , And turning requires xxx, So as long as the more business lines are output , This differentiation will become larger and larger , Slowly, this ability will become not flexible , It's hard to use and heavy ; It may even be coupled with businesses that do not belong to itself , At this time, it has deviated from the positioning of its core competence , And the people in it don't care , To put it bluntly , There is no abstract thinking and middle stage thinking .

        From a business point of view , Technology is the realization of business , In most cases , The provider will not have an in-depth understanding of the business needs of the demander , If the business on the demand side is not clear enough, the business will change , The existing business components are too heavy to meet , As a result, the business component itself will have to be designed repeatedly , Or for fast delivery , Obviously, make a new component , It can be understood as a simplified version of the previous repeated components , The cost is much lower .

        Solution ： The situation of the above problems , The real core issue , That is, the talent and organizational ability are not well matched , Rapid delivery must be the mainstream of the current market , The quality of fast delivery of good companies is also different , The root is how to design the business , It needs to be handled by special personnel , analysis , research , Not 1-2 Days can achieve ; The capabilities provided should be divided into boundaries , In fact, it's just like DDD My thoughts are the same , Divide the fields with business boundaries , Clarify the core positioning , It is not allowed to meet the business line without compromising the ability to abstract itself , Facing these complex business scenarios , Distinguishing between core abstract components and requirements change components can solve common problems .

         Such as ： Upload files , Itself is an ability to upload , And demand will become , Generate documents after uploading , Reminder message , Interact with business modules , Give permission and so on A,B,C operation , In fact, these have deviated from the responsibility and ability of file upload itself ; For these capabilities that have nothing to do with business , We can not pay attention to behaviors that have nothing to do with us , However, we should be more clear about how many requirements will be similar to such business behavior , If we distinguish this demand , It should become the core responsibility and external interaction responsibility , Abstract core responsibilities and abilities through technical means , Responsibilities for external interaction , I just need to be in the component , Release a lot of behavioral interfaces （ You don't even need to put hooks that have nothing to do with the your duties ）, When the core competence is used by the business module , Unify to realize the logic of the next interactive behavior ; This part of the logic , We will not change or provide this part which has nothing to do with the core responsibilities , In fact, this step is to determine the boundary of the domain model .

• Low data utilization

         A lot of data from business in Knowledge Management , Physically, it's centralized , But the data itself is fragmented 、 The characteristics of isolated island , There are a lot of redundant and traceless data , These data may be due to some historical data or stage design problems , It is difficult to understand these data and information semantically with traditional data processing technology , Resulting in low data utilization .

        Take the existing data , In the process of exporting business capabilities in knowledge , Data from many business lines will be collected here , for example ： Upload and download files in the business module 、 Document attachments 、 Business data forms documents or attachments and is stored in a centralized manner. These data are currently used as service business modules , And the data itself , But can't make full use of knowledge itself , There will even be redundant data , Can't trace back . At present, these data only serve business lines , Fragmentation of each type of data is generated , For example, the attachment information transferred in the process , Attachments uploaded in the daily newspaper , Document information generated from process to document , The business module is responsible for documents or empowerment data , More types of data will be collected in the future . on first face , Are showing fragmentation , And through the knowledge center , It can well classify these classified data , Through the characteristics of no class data , Extract and become commonness , Form a new ability , It can be intelligent recommendation ability , Intelligent retrieval capabilities , Knowledge aggregation remains to be considered .

• The data form is complex

         In the future, there will be some problems in the development of knowledge management business , video , A variety of texts and other structured and unstructured data are used as information , Store in the knowledge center , Then these data forms are diverse , The structure is diverse , Not only need to get through the island , So that it can not only be used as the basis for module tracing business , As knowledge itself , Semantic analysis of these data is also needed , Reuse services for users , And then build business scenarios to serve business modules in turn , The knowledge center needs to have this part of the ability . The ability to form can have file detection , speech recognition , Knowledge mining , Knowledge map, etc .

• Massive data

         Enterprises in the process of digitization , The huge amount of data generated will be stored in knowledge management , And the data scale continues to grow rapidly , Tradition IT The architecture can no longer cope with , You need to have a supporting technology center and data center as the underlying infrastructure , Support massive data , Analyze , Support multi-dimensional retrieval , Maintain the stability of the middle stage ; And on the basis of massive data , Support data collection in business , Build a knowledge application one by one .

4、 Overall architecture design of knowledge center

         The above problems can be seen , We should build a knowledge center , Analyze every problem at this stage , Whether the knowledge center can solve , And facing the digital transformation of the future , How to design the middle stage as a whole , What capabilities are provided , Empower the enterprise ？

        The business center should first form an Opening-up for the currently produced components , Reusable capability to establish a unified platform , Formulate the output standard of platform components in the business , Aggregate and classify business data , Lay a firm foundation for the rapid construction of intelligent applications in the future . When business lines need to use business component capabilities , The business center will provide relevant business components , For example, upload and download components , Document comparison component , Content detection component , Intelligent search components, etc , These are business packages built on the technology platform , Make general and scene components .

        The technology center provides technical services for the business center , This includes components related to microservices , For example, the fuse degradation component ensures high availability between multiple services in the middle office , Distributed scheduled task management xxl-job Unified management of scheduled tasks and scheduling for distributed services , Object storage 、 The docking of distributed storage and private storage technology provides physical data landing and management .ELK The service supports full-text retrieval , Speed up efficiency and retrieval accuracy , Self developed word segmentation algorithm and NLP Combine technology to form intelligent recommendation ability and so on . When business modules need to use technology component capabilities , The technical center will provide corresponding docking instruction documents , Front and rear end components or interface capabilities , and mock platform , The business module performs call verification , Of course, the platform will have certain data security verification and identity verification .

        The data center provides data guarantee for the whole knowledge center , Performance monitoring and early warning , Ensure the stability of the service , At the same time, the data center can also provide the necessary data capabilities for the business center , Such as knowledge mining of sea volume data , The construction of knowledge map and so on , And then output to the business center .

        So I'm going to build a knowledge center , Including the knowledge business center , Technology center and Data Center , In fact, the data center can be integrated with the business center , And the bottom layer is the knowledge and Technology Center , Help the upper layer realize the output of these components . For the technical capabilities required by the business line , Provide unified basic support from the technical center .

        In this regard, I have constructed a current overall design framework of knowledge management ：

        And such an architecture , Familiar people know , It is our current mainstream micro service architecture , And micro service is not equal to medium platform , It's also mentioned above , So if we want to make the design of the middle platform architecture , Need to change as a whole , Will present these services , Ability to draw into the middle stage , Output by the central console , And interacting with business lines , It is also different from traditional service interaction , The middle stage pays attention to being more flexible , Single responsibility , Low coupling and high efficiency output multiplexing capability .

        Structural evolution after transformation ：

5、 How to quickly build a knowledge center

Code under construction ... It will be posted on the back

6、 What benefits will Taiwan bring in enterprise transformation ？

        From the perspective of enterprise development, Zhongtai , Transformation of traditional industries to China Taiwan , There will be the following benefits ：

6.1、 Avoid wasting resources

For businesses , Each business department does not need to make wheels repeatedly , Whether it's a technical component or a business component , Can greatly reduce the cost of repeated construction , Realize the value of data , It can be used out of the box , Deal with multi business development , Even if the project requirements are similar , The data are roughly the same , The original components can be encapsulated to reduce labor costs , Achieve agile delivery .

6.2、 Rapid response to reduce business conflicts

For traditional industries , Expect to respond quickly to user needs , Achieve low-cost, fast iterations , In order to support the foreground business, the background continues to fill in new functions , Thus becoming increasingly bloated , It also superimposes many complex and cross business logic . After the construction of Zhongtai , Will reduce business conflicts , Draw each component into a single , Provide a unified and single capability with clear responsibilities , For subsequent iterations, extend , Will greatly reduce business conflicts and increase efficiency .

6.3、 Prompt the organizational ability of the enterprise

Zhongtai is actually an enterprise strategy , Zhongtai is an asset to the company , Not resources , It will not only act on the product dimension , Meeting Involving resource distribution , And collaboration issues , Separate the supporting functions of each business and concentrate some of them in a unified place for construction , While doing business support, Zhongtai , More things need to be done are precipitation . These precipitates , It could be the system , It could be a process , It could be experience , It could be people , None of this will disappear with each project , Will become an important asset of the company . Make major strategic decisions for the future of the company , The middle stage plays a certain role .

6.4、 Improve efficiency

Why is it great efficiency , Because more often , We are looking at the efficiency of a single dimension , For example, a project 、 The benefits of a product . But in fact, a lot of investment from China and Taiwan cannot be measured in this way , We need to look at it from the two dimensions of space and time .

Space , In other words, Zhongtai has invested a lot of projects , Not directly affect the business , It may look like Zhongtai has made something by itself , But in the end, the business still benefits .

And time , Sometimes the things made by Zhongtai have some pre reserves , It may not be able to play a significant efficiency role in a short time , But stretching to the long term , Effective for enterprises .

in general , The benefits of the middle stage , It must be based on long-term , In fact, the short-term benefit effect is not significant , For enterprises in transition , Especially during the digital transformation of traditional industries , In the early stage of transformation, it will cost a lot .

6.5、 Multi platform complex docking

Diversification of enterprise business data storage , Scattered in the enterprise data lake , Business system and other platforms . Technology stacks are also quite diverse ,CDH/HDP,Hadoop platform ,Oracle Wait for the relational database . Different data application platforms , Such as screen 、 Custom report, etc , Each team needs to develop applications independently and connect with a variety of different data platforms . If different interfaces and interfaces are developed for each requirement API The workload of development and management is complex , The cost of later maintenance is very high , And for the middle stage , After solving the problem of repeated construction , For different platforms , The middle desk can provide transit service , It can also be used as a direct service to provide data and business docking .

7、 Problems faced by Taiwan in enterprise transformation ？

7.1、 The middle stage is the core center , Chinese and Taiwanese people should have a strong sense of responsibility and professionalism

The structure of the middle stage , Realize the business capability , From the previous closed loop , Into the current business + China and Taiwan jointly complete . The perfect cooperation mechanism , It's impossible to solve all the problems , And then , We must play a human role , To carry out “ Grey areas ” Complement of . Business BP Role is the embodiment of taking the initiative to fill the position in the middle stage , His control of the whole business should have a level of sufficient professionalism and excellent quality .

meanwhile , Central flexibility 、 Efficient 、 Stability requirements , Let us feel the great responsibility , And I want to do these things well , It requires the professionalism of Chinese and Taiwanese . Therefore, generally, the requirements for core positions in the middle stage are higher , In terms of job qualifications and recruitment difficulties , Non ordinary personnel can start directly , Technically , We also need more senior industry experts to design the technology and business of Zhongtai .

7.2、 Chinese and Taiwanese people need strong self drive and flexible thinking ability

This requires very high overall quality for the development of enterprises in Taiwan , Every enterprise has a different way to be a middle platform , Solutions to the complexity of the problem , Are not the same as , If the middle ground personnel do not have such thinking and strong drive , Then Zhongtai will only greatly consume the cost of the enterprise , And the design is not satisfactory .

7.3、 Zhongtai can't do all the needs , Limited resources must give full play to their maximum value

As a middle stage , Often face hundreds of business needs . Can we meet these needs ？ Of course not. . China and Taiwan resources must be limited , Although the scale of Zhongtai may be very large , But your relative business needs will certainly be more .

therefore , The middle stage can't do all the needs , There must be a trade-off between needs , The conventional approach is value judgment + Blocking judgment . Value judgments are well understood , Is to do the company's strategy oriented 、 Important projects of important business , Only in this way can we maximize ROI. And blocking judgment , That is, when the service has been connected to the central station , Even if business is not very important , As far as possible, the middle office also needs to ensure some ability support that can block the business , Don't let business stagnate . And other needs , Capable of business closed loop , Try to keep the business closed-loop .

Such a principle , It will certainly make some businesses feel “ unequal ”, For example, why can this business do , This can't be done , But this may be a natural contradiction , In particular, the bandwidth of the middle station itself is narrow , When there is no room to move . And solve this contradiction , In addition to maintaining good communication , More, we need to rely on some symmetrical mechanisms to transfer contradictions out .

7.4、 Zhongtai is a form of organization , Involving resource distribution , And collaboration issues , Need company CEO、CTO Make decisions and stick to

Be the middle stage , In addition to saying that the business form should meet the above requirements , Another key point is needed , That is the need for the head of the company 、 The second leader makes decisions .

Because of the middle office structure , Itself is a form of organization , Separate the supporting functions of each business and concentrate some of them in a unified place for construction , Therefore, the core also involves the distribution and allocation of resources . That's natural , The problem of collaboration will be extended , Cooperation between business and middle office , It must not be as handy as internal business collaboration . Middle stage difficulty , It is precisely more from this problem .

7.5、 Contradictions that will arise in the construction of the middle office

• Contradiction between business requirements and implementation priorities
• The contradiction between business and the responsibility boundary of the middle office
• The contradiction between the business needs of China and Taiwan and the allocation of their own construction resources
• The contradiction between short-term value and long-term value
• Space time reasons , The contradiction that it is difficult to measure value
• Zhongtai drives the contradiction that the whole is beneficial but the part is not profitable
• The bottleneck of middle office resources and the long schedule of complex functions , Cause the contradiction of business black box understanding
• In business cooperation owner The contradiction of consciousness

These contradictions , It will bring many difficulties to the business and the daily work of both China and Taiwan , These difficulties are actually the biggest thing to be solved in the development of China and Taiwan , In fact, it is equal to , Enterprises should build a middle platform in the early stage , The cost must be relatively large , So ordinary enterprises , Maybe I can't afford to finish like this , It also needs some technology , data , The precipitation of business strategy and culture . Evaluate it , We have to think again .

Comments are welcome to add and correct ！