BPM / SOA Consortium Insights

March Symposium in Jacksonville: BPM, SOA & Carving a path to Business-IT Integration

The Business Ecology Initiative and BPM / SOA Consortium are co-hosting a two-day symposium, March 23-24, 2010, in Jacksonville FL.  The Symposium will feature invited speaker talks and group discussion on Business Ecology, BPM and SOA drivers, successes and enablers.  The program will focus on the connection between business and technology, with a particular emphasis on practices to carve a path to business-IT integration. 

Invited speakers include:

Faisal Hoque, Founder and Chief Executive Officer, BTM Corporation, on The Power of Convergence: Why Bringing Business and Technology Together Matters

Unifying the management of business and technology will sooner or later involve everyone in an organization, from the chairman of the board to the newest hire on a project team. Convergence requires not only new roles and responsibilities but also a new mindset and new skills. In converged companies, business-unit and technology leaders operate almost interchangeably: every manager is accountable for some business-related aspect of technology. One sign of a converged company is that the people making decisions have mastered the skills needed to articulate their business objectives and use the appropriate technology required to achieve those objectives.

Faisal will illustrate the hallmarks of a converged organization according to the Business Technology Management Framework and define a set of organizational competencies that enable an enterprise to manage business and technology together, as well as outline how maturity in these capabilities is achieved through the implementation of well-defined processes, appropriate organizational structures, timely information and appropriate technology automation.

Dr. Don Belles, Boeing on IT: Transformative or Transformer?

In this session Dr. Belles will offer his insights on why previous approaches to business and IT integration have failed to provide a complete systemic picture of what happens to the business environment from changes in the field of IT.  Building on the work of the Alvin and Heidi Toffler, it becomes apparent the relationship between Business and IT will remain tumultuous at best.  But each of these IT perceptual changes has only reinforced the existing structure and maintained a business dependent paradigm.  Technology ceased as a tool, partner, or an enabler, it is a transformer, not merely transformative.  The business environment is transformed by the way technology interacts with existing environmental transformers such as politics, societal wisdom, global financial activity, legal decisions, etc.  Currently we are on the cusp of a dramatic change in thinking.  This evolving business environment demands rethinking; not only how to apply the new technology, but also how to integrate the near-term-emerging and soon-due-technologies with the social constructs appearing within the new, transitional, and old consumer bases.  Distinctions between technology use and social application are disappearing.  Web2.0 is merely the leading edge of the transformation. 

William Ulrich, President, Tactical Strategy Group, Inc. on A Proven Collaborative Governance Model for Business and IT

Business and IT have increasingly grown apart over the past decades and this has resulted in a misalignment of strategic and tactical goals and a communication breakdown between these two distinct, yet highly intertwined worlds. Business and IT largely communicate through a complex web of intermediaries that includes business analysts, IT analysts, IT architects, designers and a labyrinth of management tiers. Collaboration has been replaced by more and more costly efforts to create new techniques, technologies, communication languages and a variety of panaceas.

This session will provide a collaborative governance model to address the business / IT alignment and communication gap. We will also review a case study from a telecommunications company where the business / IT communication gap was closed and collaborative governance became a solution in practice – not just in name.

Alexander Samarin, Author of Improving Enterprise Business Process Management Systems, on Achieving synergy between BPM, SOA and EA

In this talk Alexander will share his experience with an architectural framework, which combines several modern methodologies and technologies [Enterprise Architecture (EA), Business Process Management (BPM) and Service Oriented Architecture (SOA)] for the improvement of enterprise business performance.  He will present the description of the architectural framework and examples of business cases.

Joe Raynus, Principal Consultant, ShareDynamics, Inc., on Business Ecology: Leveraging the Innovation Curve to Achieve Balance and Alignment in the Ever-changing Environment

To stay competitive, organizations have to have a high level of agility to adapt rapidly and cost efficiently to complex environment challenges such as customer demands, competition, markets, compliance requirements and economic conditions, to name a few. Is there a "method to the madness"? Can we ever achieve the level of flexibility, balance and technology alignment to effectively support the enterprise? This presentation will examine the concepts of Business Ecology, Innovation Curve and Measurement Framework that will help better understand, monitor and measure critical processes, analyze challenges and proactively take action.

In addition to the invited speaker sessions, Gail Raynus of ShareDynamics will lead a roundtable discussion on technology and business architecture, Brenda Michelson of Elemental Links, will lead a roundtable discussion on raising IT professionals’ business IQ, and representatives of the EA2010 group will discuss their recent Business Architecture Paper and the community response.

The Symposium is open to the public.  Review the agenda.  Register for the event.

Forrester: Business Process Professionals Tweet Jam on Wednesday, Feb 10, 2010

Our friends at Forrester are hosting a BPM-related “Tweet Jam” on Wednesday the 10th.  Forrester analysts will be tweeting answers to top challenges faced in process improvement initiatives.  As posted on the Forrester Business Process & Applications Professional blog, the questions to be discussed during the Tweet Jam include:

    1. Which role(s) should lead your business process initiative?

    2. What are the best practices for establishing your BPM COE?

    3. Do your traditional business analysts have what it takes to drive BPM initiatives?

    4. How heavily should you rely on your software vendor for project implementation?

    5. How should you connect your EA and BPM initiatives?

    6. Which process improvement methodology (Six Sigma, Lean, TQM) is best for your initiative?

    7. How should you incorporate BPMN modeling into your process initiative?

    8. How should you measure the progress or success of your process initiative?

    9  What’s the typical size and composition of process improvement teams?

    10. How should process improvement connect to master data management?

    11. How do you think Social BPM will impact your organization?

Participating analysts are Clay Richardson, Connie Moore, Craig Le Clair, Alex Peters, John Rymer, and Ken Vollmer.

You can follow the conversation using the #bpmjam hashtag.

BPM and SOA: Connected for Business Optimization

In October, the SOA Consortium announced the successful completion of its mission as well as plans to merge with the BPM Consortium.  Since January, the organizations have been working together to formalize the merged consortium’s mission, goals and objectives, identify some early projects, plan the March Symposium, and combine web properties. 

In this post, I want to share the newly combined BPM / SOA Consortium’s mission, goals and objectives.  But first, the context. 

Who is the BPM / SOA Consortium? 

The BPM / SOA Consortium is an advocacy group comprised of practitioners, service providers and technology vendors dedicated to promoting the business value, and enabling the successful adoption, of Business Process Management (BPM) and Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) by the Global 1000, major government agencies and midmarket businesses.

The BPM / SOA Consortium is a practice area community under the Business Ecology^TM Initiative (BEI).  BEI provides education, advocacy and member programs to enable organizations to achieve Business Ecology success, employ Actionable Architecture^TM, and carve a path to business-IT integration.

Business Ecology is a business-technology imperative focused on streamlining business processes, removing waste from technology portfolios, and adjusting resource consumption, to optimize business operations and foster business innovation.

The BPM / SOA Consortium is a newly expanded community, connecting the members and sponsors of the SOA and BPM Consortiums, to focus on business optimization.

Why did the BPM & SOA Consortiums merge?

The 2010 merger of the SOA and BPM Consortiums is based on the following premises:

• When the SOA Consortium began, Service Oriented Architecture was more of a fringe methodology that only a few organizations were doing with any great success, rather than an accepted part of an overall business strategy. Three years later, corporations large and small use the principles of SOA to enhance their overall business and technology strategies.
• A well-implemented Service Oriented Architecture leads to streamlined technology portfolios, improved resource sharing, better defined business capabilities, and ease of capability introduction or change.
• A well-implemented Business Process Management initiative leads to greater business agility, faster productivity and improved customer interactions for all stakeholders.
• The combined use of Service Oriented Architecture and Business Process Management results in an optimized business environment that is change-friendly, and poised for business innovation.
• Business and information technology professionals must collaborate to realize the highest yielding benefits of Business Process Management and Service Oriented Architecture.
• Enterprise and government practitioners would benefit greatly from a vibrant practitioner community to exchange insights on use cases, challenges and techniques, related to Service Oriented Architecture and Business Process Management, used individually, or combined.
• Business Process Management and Service Oriented Architecture, individually and combined, enable Business Ecology.

And now, the go forward organization.

BPM / SOA Consortium Mission

Promote the value and adoption of Business Process Management and Service Oriented Architecture as a means for organizations to optimize business operations, increase agility and streamline portfolios.

BPM / SOA Consortium Goals

The BPM / SOA Consortium is working to achieve the following goals by 2013, that:

• 75% of the Global 1000 and 50% of mid-sized businesses combine Business Process Management and Service Oriented Architecture to optimize business operations, streamline portfolios, and create a change-friendly business-technology environment.
• 75% of Major Government Agencies combine Business Process Management and Service Oriented Architecture to optimize mission operations, streamline portfolios, and create a change-friendly business-technology environment.

BPM / SOA Consortium Objectives:

• Shift the conversation from competing strategies to combined business value (business optimization)
• Provide education on business analysis, process design, governance, performance measurement and implementation techniques to combine Service Oriented Architecture and Business Process Management for business optimization
• Showcase Business Process Management and Service Oriented Architecture success stories, benefit realization, best practices and lessons learned
• Raise the Business IQ of information technology professionals and Tech-Savvy of business professionals to realize the greatest business value from Business Process Management, Service Oriented Architecture and business-technology
• Create a vibrant practitioner community for the exchange of insights on use cases, challenges and techniques, which will assist in value attainment, and spur broader, industry-wide Service Oriented Architecture and Business Process Management adoption.

Visit our website to learn about BPM / SOA Consortium membership and sponsorship.  Check out the agenda for our upcoming public symposium in Jacksonville Florida.

2009 Year in Review with Richard Soley: SOA, BPM, Cloud Computing and more

SearchSOA’s Rob Barry interviewed Richard Soley, CEO of the OMG, and Executive Director of the BPM / SOA Consortium, on hot topics at the close of 2009, including SOA, BPM, Cloud Computing and the future of information technology.  See what Richard has to say on 2009 and beyond in this 8:00 minute video interview.

Community Insights: Services, Sprawl, Marketplaces, Bazaars and Portfolio Management

Note: For practitioners, one of the most valuable aspects of consortium participation is the opportunity to exchange ideas in a trusted peer community.  While the diverse group doesn’t always reach a single conclusion, each participant gains new perspective to consider in their unique situations. 

One such SOA Consortium conversation thread started with service value, covered service marketplaces, cathedrals and bazaars, and concluded with service portfolio management.  What follows are notes from that conversation, published not as an answer, but for consideration as you expand the breadth and depth of your service-oriented architecture.  As always, we welcome comments.

CALL #1 – Service Sprawl and Service Marketplaces

In a series of calls, the SOA Consortium’s community of practice engaged in a very interesting discussion on service portfolio management.  The conversation began innocently enough, when one member queried the group on visual methods to demonstrate the value of a services approach to business personnel. 

This member was looking for insights on creating a business intelligence dashboard for business stakeholders to see the value of service adoption, including key metrics on service use and re-use, and time-to-market improvements.  His motivation wasn’t marketing, but an underlying concern that full SOA value wasn’t attained because of service sprawl.

In this case, the service sprawl had two sources.  First, and the more common cause, SOA was simultaneously adopted in different business lines.  In the early stages, each business line created its own services, unaware of reuse or collaboration opportunities.  Second, the organization acquired another organization with similar business lines, which was also pursuing SOA. 

Through conversation, members noted other service sprawl causes, such as lack of trust, immature service governance practices, and no mandates for service rationalization.

From here, the group began discussing ways to reduce and prevent service sprawl.  A popular idea was the creation of a services marketplace.  In a short brainstorming session, the group discussed incorporating prediction markets to gauge service popularity, and social technologies to build trust, as well as to strengthen the service offering with better definition, feature/function, and performance.  Detailed brainstorming notes follow.

Services Market Place Requirements

• Organizations need to “advertise” their services, advertise as in “marketing”, not UDDI type directory listing
• Developers need to learn about “popular services”.  These trusted services will continue to receive investment.  Less popular, duplicate services should be slated for obsolescence.
• Service consumers need ability to provide feedback on service, and suggest improvements
• People need ability to “vote with feet” or code
• Service sprawl is a people problem, therefore a social solution is required

Services Marketplace Functionality/Technology Ideas

• Create a prediction market to understand service popularity (existing or planned service).  Each marketplace participant creates an investment portfolio of 10 services.  To add a service to your portfolio, one must be removed.  The service mix across portfolios will indicate service popularity, as well as pruning trends.  Spigit was cited as a technology example, it is used by Microsoft (and others) for release date prediction
• Use Amazon model for customer review and even for service recommendations “consumers of this service also use this/these service(s)”
• eBay seller rating, equates to service publisher rating, “also available from this publisher…”
• Service definition might benefit from Facebook (Lombardi) extended water cooler model, experts/interested parties can add to definition/requirements in public wiki like environment

Services Marketplace Questions

• Is there a unit of exchange?  If so, what is it?
• What is the best way to bring the marketplace into the work stream of potential service consumers, providers?  Is it via calendaring – associated with design and review meetings?  Modeling tools?  IDE?
• Is there a similar marketplace opportunity for a business process models?

About this point, the group made the leap to the Cathedral & Bazaar metaphor.  Service repository as we know it today is Cathedral, Services marketplace is Bazaar.

Service Bazaar Startup Needs

• Advertise the Bazaar
• Place close to work stream
• Establish minimum entry requirements: Merchants must provide certain attributes for each service: purpose, business process, business process model, nonfunctional attributes, implementation attributes (can and can’t do), chargeback and rates, classes of service (levels, cost), support model (use at own risk or supported)
• Find and win early adopters
• Incorporate knowledge management, social technology and community practices
• Word of mouth marketing – early adopters are best advocates
• Incremental introduction plan

At the close of the call, the member originally posing the service sprawl problem decided to explore prediction market technology for service portfolio rationalization.  As well, the group decided to continue the bazaar discussion on the next call.

CALL #2 – Service Cathedrals and Bazaars

Continuing the services marketplace conversation theme, but with many new call participants, there was a strong sense that service sprawl needs to be managed both proactively, via portfolio definition/management practices and reactively, via both top-down rationalization efforts and bottoms-up service marketplace advertising and consumption patterns.

Call participants from enterprises expressed concerned that a pure services marketplace – introducing competing code – is not behavior a development organization can afford to participate in.

There was strong support for the advertising aspect of the services marketplace, letting people know a service existed, its purpose, current usage scenarios, community ratings etc. 

For a services marketplace to be successful, it needs to be close to where developers work.  Oracle’s Enterprise repository (BEA Flashline) was cited as an example of tool with community engagement vision.

It was noted that in organizations where sprawl exists, or M&A activity is underway, the services marketplace can provide a mechanism to contain further sprawl and promote (Darwinian) rationalization, even before formal rationalization assignments/efforts are underway. 

Another note was that duplication does not always equate to waste.  An organization’s operating model (see Ross & Weil) may call for some separation of services to support a fast growing/changing business unit/activity.

There was a call for distinction in the marketplace’s unit of exchange (used in funding decisions) from service portfolio metrics.  Service portfolio metrics should not be number of services; instead use percentage of (unplanned) redundancy & coverage gaps. 

The group believes portfolio management – value of IT investment over time – is an important concept.  The current project focus in most organizations – on-time and on-budget measurement – is very short sighted.  Businesses do look at total IT spend over time, and percent of development versus maintenance, but most often don’t drill into the specific business domains or business capability.  This lack of transparency can lead to a behavior of delivering sub-par solutions that require frequent replacement. 

In respect to proactive service rationalization, the group spoke of defining enterprise and/or domain service maps. They also spoke of the need to get business analysts involved in service definition, and that business analysts might be better accepted by business units if they (business analysts) reported to Finance or Quality, rather than IT.

Additionally, the group discussed incentives for sharing services.  The biggest point/concern here is that the incentives need to map to portfolio metrics and goals.  Avoid the trap of putting incentives in place that encourage “gaming the system” to receive the incentive while damaging the overall service portfolio.  Some members believe the incentive is keeping your job.

A late discussion point was that sustainable SOA has organizational implications beyond initial centers of excellence.  Sustainable SOA requires pervasive practice, cascading changes (service thinking and management) to funding practices, project management, solution delivery, operations, and change management.  In other words, SOA cannot be a side practice forever.

CALL #3 – Service Portfolio Management

Reviewing the key discussion points over the past two calls, the group concludes that both models – Services Cathedral and Services Bazaar – are valid.

The adoption of a cathedral and/or bazaar approach may vary based on project lifecycle phase, business criticality of the problem being solved, experience of the project/development team in respect to SOA, and/or time to market considerations.

A discussion on project lifecycle practices leads to a discussion on portfolio management practices:

• Organizations most often view portfolio management in respect to managing concurrent projects and managing IT investment. 
• Organizations also practice asset management in respect to purchased (infrastructure oriented) software and hardware.  Vendor contracts, releases, technology advances and the like drive these asset management practices.
• Organizations seldom practice asset management practices on their application portfolios, and if they do, it is for purchased rather than custom-built software. 

A service-oriented approach fundamentally changes the basic management unit from an application, to services, or a bundle of services that represent a business function (component, segment, flow or capability), which are consumed by many applications, business processes and/or domains.

The multi-purpose aspect of services, and bill-of-materials structure of service compositions and solution assemblies, point more towards product management practices than traditional application management practices.  The shift to product, rather than project or application thinking, forces changes to funding, project management, asset management and operations practices. 

Most notably, organizations will need to be deliberate in the realm of service portfolio management, understanding what business capabilities are offered in the portfolio (marketplace), how those capabilities are instantiated via software and information assets (model to asset mapping), and how/where those capabilities are packaged into end-products (applications, processes) that solve a business need.

The diagram below, previously published, illustrates services and the various process and portfolio interaction points across the service lifecycle.

[Click on diagram to enlarge]

SOA Consortium EA2010 Working Group’s Business Architecture Paper Now Available

The SOA Consortium’s EA2010 Working Group – a group of “street-smart” enterprise architecture practitioners – has been actively discussing the domains, services, practices and skills required for a thriving, business relevant enterprise architecture practice in the 2010s. 

A critical finding of these discussions is the emphasis of technology concerns at the expense of business understanding, and ultimately, true business enablement, in most enterprise architecture practices today. Successful enterprise architecture practices in the 2010s must give equal emphasis to technology and business concerns. The means for this re-balancing is the elevation, and in some cases initial adoption, of business architecture practices.

Typically, the business architecture practices and artifacts in enterprise architecture frameworks focus on business processes and business uses cases. This is not surprising, since these artifacts and practices are a prerequisite to IT-based business solution delivery. However, this is not sufficient.

To reap the benefits of business architecture – business visibility and agility – the business architecture must reflect the entire business design, from the point of view of business designers and owners, rather than IT solution delivery. This point of view begins with business motivations, includes key business execution elements – such as operating model, capabilities, value chains, processes, and organizational models – and transcends information technology representations, such as business services, rules, events and information models.

While we strongly believe that business architecture is a business domain, the Chief Information Officer (CIO), given his/her unique position to view business plans, business processes, information flows, and technology portfolios across the organization, most often champions business architecture formalization. 

In this discussion-oriented paper, the EA2010 group shares their findings on the following questions:

•    What comprises business architecture? 
•    What is the purpose? 
•    Who participates? 
•    How do you make business architecture accessible? 
•    How does business architecture facilitate business decision-making and change? 
•    How do you keep business architecture current?
•    How does business architecture relate to BPM, SOA and IT solution delivery?

To read the paper please go here.

If you have comments on the paper and/or insights on the discussion questions, please leave a comment here or email us.