BPM / SOA Community Insights

@ SOA | BPM Symposium: David Broadbent, Parity Solutions on Overcoming Resistance in Change Programs

Session Abstract:

David Broadbent, Business Process Consultant, Parity Solutions on How to Overcome Resistance to Change in Change Programs

There have been many papers written about how business process management can yield benefits to organizations but not enough about dealing with the people aspects of change. David Broadbent presented a case study at the OMG BPM Think Tank in Putten Holland in November 2008 looking at the aspects of culture on change programs, describing culture as the ‘forgotten variable’ in change programs. Following ongoing work with a number of clients this talk will take some of the thoughts he presented to the next stage, namely how to resolve the ‘Resistance to change’.

After the lunch break, David Broadbent is up, talking about the cultural implications of change.  David picks up on the engineering theme from this morning, says his engineering background led him into process focused work.

David opens with the black cloud (recession) that is over industry.  The pressure for efficiency, survival.  This is driving BPM.  David believes culture is often the forgotten piece to change.  Frequent issues: lack of communication, lack of end-to-end ownership, lack of understanding of end-to-end process, resulting in “blame culture”.

David introduces the “doom merchant”, the guy who spreads fear in response to change.  The doom merchant’s actions incite resistance. 

Classic types of resistance: Refusal (verbal and non-verbal), Denial, and Obstruction (deliberate and non-deliberate).  New type, brought out by this recession is Apathy.  David likens apathy to being punch-drunk.  After going through 2-3 rounds of cuts, people just don’t care.  In fact, they’d like to leave, but can’t because jobs aren’t available.  Another aspect is fear of being next.  People with time (or interest) to help, won’t volunteer to help, because they don’t want to call attention to having free time.

David is transitioning to approach.  He calls out that there isn’t one methodology for BPM.  Not every method will work in every situation.  For example, you can’t apply a manufacturing oriented approach for a highly variable environment such as an emergency room.

Approach:

1. Preparation: 5-10% of program time. 

-- gain senior management buy-in (sponsorship, funding, communications plan).  Want to attain a mandate to change.

-- Scope: realistic goals, CSF (performance, cost, quality, speed or service), identify which business processes / scenarios are being tackled

-- Resources: subject matter experts, business analysts, project support (IT and such); Asking for people is the first indicator of management buy-in.  Did you get time of the superstars?

David has put up The Inter-Change Cycle by Salerno & Brock; calls out the danger zone, as the pivotal point where people decide if they will move forward with change, or not.  Reasons why not, too big, too overwhelming.

Important to break problem down into smaller pieces, pieces that can be incrementally delivered and positively impact the people in the organization.  Important that the change team (insiders) deliver the change to the people.  Need to build confidence in the change team.  David cites agile approaches. 

Another key here is communication.  Constant communication from the change team.  The people from the organization (insiders) doing the work.  Not communication from the change consultants. 

In addition to the change team, the executives must continue to communicate.  Executives need to continuously show commitment.

The audience took David on a bit of a tangent, but an important point came out, the assignment of executive process owners.  This is often a big deal in organizations because executives typically have vertical (function & organization) control, not horizontal (process) control.  Process ownership forces end-to-end control and visibility, and executive collaboration (in this together).

Tackling resistance:

Refusal: People refusing don’t want to be seen as “getting in the way”.  Quotes Jack Welch, you either change the people, or change (out) the people.

Obstruction: Dedicate staff to BPM/Change program

Denial: Make “not changing” not an option

Apathy: Make people part of the solution.  Active role in the change.  Don’t impose change upon them.  Create momentum.

You need to silence the doom merchants.  These actions will drown them out.

Theme from the day, continuous improvement. 

Summary:

- Senior Management Buy-in (ask them 3 times)

- Really serious mandate

-- dedicated resource

-- fixed scope

-- process ownership

- Agile delivery of change products

- Communication (I think, flashed by)

David cites Gartner CIO Agenda for 2009: #1 is Improving Business Processes, expected to remain #1 until 2012, when replaced by Product Introduction (post recession)

@ SOA | BPM Symposium: Ryan Gates, Appian

Session Abstract:

Ryan Gates, Senior Solutions Architect, Appian  on BPM Accelerated: Merging Technology and Methodology for Rapid Results

Modern application development approaches delivering faster and better business decision-making are a must across increasingly dynamic global markets. New IT models such as mash-ups, situational applications and Software-as-a-Service delivery are driving competitive advantage for the companies that can utilize them effectively. Business Process Management (BPM) provides the platform to harness this dynamic power. This presentation discusses how easily-consumable, secure and scalable software, along with a proven methodology for rapid deployment delivers results faster.

Ryan’s agenda is BPM: What, Why and How, plus a Case Study on SaaS based approach to BPM.

Ryan starts with a general definition of BPM, splitting out business process from business process technology.  Appian offers a business process management suite.  Ryan has components diagram up now, the center is the Process Engine.  Ringing the engine are: SOA, Business Modeling, Portal/UI, Case Management, Content Management, Events/Messages, Real-time Analytics, BAM and Simulation. Ringing those are templates and frameworks. The outmost ring was business focuses: optimization, and 2 things I missed.

Beyond Rapid Application Development, BPM enables:

- Common language between business and IT

- Increased flexibility of IT systems

- Less time on systems maintenance, more time on innovation

- Opportunity to better leverage and manage emerging SOAs

Who implements BPM?

- IT departments

--- Solve IT process workflows, such as governance, project management, change management

--- Rapidly deliver business solutions

- Lines of Business

--- Appian does have direct sales to Business Units, Business units want to model and automate processes

--- May, or may not, require IT integration

Accelerate BPM in Organization

- Business Case

- Identify right tools

- create team (people)

- develop and deploy (methodology)

- measure success – according to Ryan this needs to start at day one with goal setting

- repeat

How do you sell BPM in organization.  In 2009, CFO is king (same as Clay mentioned). 

Look for:

- Demonstrable bottom line value

- Process centric organizations are not built overnight

--- focused projects, incremental process centric expansion

- Increased consistency and efficiency

- Increased visibility

- competitive advantage

Customer examples: Concur, US Marine Corps, Enterprise Rent a Car, European bank – these were all “rapid ROI” examples

Three legs of stool for successful BPM: Technology, Methodology and People

Tool selection factors:

- On-premise or on demand (SaaS)

- Rapid prototyping, deployment, change management – how does tool manage change?

- Process and development ecosystem

- Real-time analytics -- “if you cannot measure it, you cannot manage it”

- Ease of use

People – collection of IT developers, business analysts and end-users

Methodology – Ryan’s methodology slide has Center of Excellence in the middle.  Ryan says COE shouldn’t equate to specific group of people, the COE is a discipline.  The goal of the COE is grow organization’s process centricity.

Now, a maturity model.  Goes from Individual to Project to Program to Enterprise.  Ryan says the point is to continuously deliver value.  Don’t start big.  Start with value.  This ties to Clay’s talk as well.

Ryan is talking about “Worse is Better”, idea by Richard Gabriel in 1991, contrasting the “right thing” vs. “worse is better”

- Right Thing: correctness, consistency, completeness trump everything, at the expense of simplicity

- Worse is Better: Simplicity above correctness, consistency and completeness. 

Ryan mentions similarity to Cathedral and Bazaar.  I’d also point to the “Good Enough Revolution”.  His point, again, goes to value delivery.  You can’t know what ‘completeness’ is.  You can (should) plan for continuous change.  Work towards getting things more correct over time.  However, those changes shouldn’t (continuously) tear your company apart. 

Ryan says you need to pick your first project weighing process complexity and business exposure.  He flashed by a 4-quadrant chart up with some examples. 

The case study: Clayton Financial

Challenges:

- rapidly changing industry

- increased scrutiny on expenses

- limited visibility

- some more…

As well, needed something now.  Didn’t have time, budget for big IT initiative.  Led to selection of Appian’s BPM SaaS offering.

The case process revolved around the Financial Analysts.  Got a process up in 4-6 weeks.  Now, monthly releases.  Initially, no integration.  So, no IT required to start.

Lessons:

Lots listed on the slide, Ryan emphasizes Prototype Everything and Frequent Releases. 

Others: resist temptation to start at detailed level of process.  Emphasize reporting needs up front. Limited or no system integration in first release.  Focus on change management and process management early on.

@ SOA | BPM Symposium: Keynote: Clay Richardson, Forrester

Session Abstract: Clay will unveil the latest Forrester thinking on BPM / SOA and provide valuable insight on the future of enterprise technology.

 

Clay Richardson is starting us off this morning, kids he’ll be tweeting as he presents. His presentation is entitled Detect and Eliminate BPM Budget Busters, and is focused on LEAN BPM.  LEAN, Clay describes, is about being the right size for what you are trying to do.  While the presentation is focused on BPM, many of the concepts apply to SOA.  Recent Forrester survey, BPM is the number one priority for organizations.  Hard hurt industries, such as financial services, are number one adopters.  However, at the same time, these organizations are seeing their BPM budgets being cut.  Thus, the need for LEAN BPM.

To be successful with BPM:

- Think like a CFO to keep initiative off chopping blocks

- Overcome PR issues

- Adopt LEAN practices in effort

Calls out Economist article from early this year on CFO as new king in the organization.  I read that.  Essentially, it talked about the return of initiatives that have quantifiable bottom lines, versus nebulous “growth” or “innovation” stories.

Challenge 1, BPM is high priority, but  getting funding is hard, and the amount is decreasing.  The secret, Clay says is that CFO’s have a passion for process.  Shows us a tag cloud of article titles from CFO publications.  Big words: Management, Reporting, Regulatory, Benefit, Process.

Challenge 2, once you get the budget, how do you maximize the value?

LEAN BPM Trends

1. BPM-as-a-Service

2. Platform Convergence – using right BPM tool for right job.  Also, understanding data quality implications.  BPM & MDM should be considered together.  Forrester calls this “process data management”

3. Lightweight BPM – matching the tool for the job.  If automating employee on-boarding, might go with lighter tool.  Such as Serena, which has mash-up capability.  The downside, could result in unmanaged sprawl as we saw with Microsoft Access.  Calls out need for governance.

4. Solution Frameworks

5. BPM Center of Excellence – Must important is to pick the methodology that matches what you are trying to do.  The governance process should support this.  Don’t pick the method first, understand the problem first.

Clay is talking about OMG’s Business Ecology:

- Business Ecology is about minimizing waste streams

- Business Ecology is about (something) to do with minimizing environmental impacts (green/sustainability)

Clay has a Forrester Wave up now.  Lean and collaborative components are driving the next wave of BPM adoption.  Clay mentions related blog post.  The wave he is speaking to is published in that post.

Social technology brings in the ability to keep context, maintain all related conversations.

Reviewing the wave diagram, Clay is now talking about in-process analytics, the capability to analyze and adjust processes on the fly.  In-process analytics uses complex event processing.  The industry leading this now is healthcare.

Another area Clay points out is Process Data Management.  Again, the combination of MDM & BPM.  It’s important to be able to rate the quality of the data as the process is executing.  If you know the data quality is less than stellar, you might not make an in-process decision.

Clay is emphasizing that MDM isn’t solely in the realm of SOA, it’s important in place.  Question: Does BPM take on MDM responsibility?  Should they be kept separate (I believe the question is technology/tools focused, not architecture strategy).  Answer: BPM would know the data quality and then delegate the cleansing to the MDM realm.  The real issue is getting BPM & MDM initiatives / people talking.  BPM & MDM can’t survive separately.  If the data isn’t clean, people won’t trust the process.  On the MDM side, if the governance process isn’t automated, you don’t really know if the data is ok.

This will have interesting implications for organizations that currently do MDM type work in the back-end, somewhere between the data warehouse and business intelligence.  Moves everything more real-time.  Or, data needs metadata on relative data quality (cleansed yet) to be factored into business process execution and decision making.  Interesting stuff.

Now, some group discussion on responsibility for data quality (let’s call it health), and the assumptions data consumers make on that health.

Challenges on BPM projects:

- Consensus log jams

- Skills mismatch – make sure the analysts you rely on are skilled in process design, not just process requirements gathering.  This is the difference between a (traditional) business analyst and a process analyst.  Keys are (1) recognize and eliminate bloated requirements, (2) have evolutionary mindset – recognize the 80/20 and (3) collaborate. 

Besides the harder skills, analyst also needs to “have passion for process”.  Passion includes “process orientation” and “tech savvy”. 

Audience comment, Clay agrees, this is a re-emergence of industrial engineering. 

- Waterfall mindset

One more thing on the skills, the best process analysts have engineering backgrounds.

In discussion with the group, Clay is telling a horror story of government waste, on a “transformation” initiative with a 500-page requirements document.  In the end, the “solution” didn’t meet the original need.  Ignored key value objectives.  Perfect example of need for LEAN.  Focus on value delivery.  Stop when value stops.

Key differentiation with “re-engineering the corporation” is the focus on people.

@ SOA | BPM Symposium in San Antonio, Texas

This week, I’m at the Inaugural SOA | BPM Symposium in San Antonio, Texas.  The program, put together jointly by the SOA Consortium and BPM Consortium, features invited speaker talks, case studies, panels and group discussion on using SOA and BPM, individually and together, to achieve business value.

For those following the SOA Consortium since the onset, you know we view SOA and BPM as complementary strategies.  Each delivers business value on its own.  But, used together, the business value amplifies.  Of course, in the beginning we were amongst the minority that saw SOA and BPM as complements rather than competitors.

In fact, in our first Executive Summit series in February 2007, leading CIOs and CTOs implored us to help "break the artificial divide between SOA and BPM".  From their point of view, SOA and BPM are complements:

    “SOA, BPM, Lean, Six Sigma are all basically one thing (business strategy and structure) that must work side by side”. – CTO during SOA Executive Summit

An excerpt from our Executive Summit whitepaper (pdf) expands on this statement:

“The CIO and CTO participants think about SOA from a top-down business view. That view starts with business processes, expands into business activities, associates those activities to the balance sheet, and then considers the required business services to accomplish those activities. These business services are not at the discrete technical implementation level. Rather, the business services refer to services provided by humans, or machines.

Essentially, these executives see SOA as the means to “execute the business model”. For this to transpire, the methods to define and record this executable business model, and the supporting technology must be seamless. In the minds of IT executives, SOA and BPM related products are used in concert to accomplish one goal, despite the discrete technology industry packaging.”

Now, with the artificial divide removed, it’s time to bring the communities together to share insights, warnings and value statements.  I look forward to hearing real-world stories and participating in the symposium discussion.

To extend the insights and conversations outside of the conference room, I’ll be live-blogging from Tuesday’s session, and we’ll record several of the Tuesday and Wednesday sessions to be published as podcasts.  I’m hosting on Wednesday, so no live-blogging.  And of course, there will be twittering both days. 

Inaugural SOA & BPM Symposium, September 15-16 in San Antonio, Texas

The SOA Consortium and BPM Consortium are co-hosting a two-day symposium, September 15-16 2009, in San Antonio Texas.  The program features invited speaker talks, case studies, panels and group discussion on using SOA and BPM, individually and together, to achieve business value.

Invited Speaker Sessions:

Clay Richardson, Forrester, Analyst Keynote on The future of BPM and SOA

Dr. Wolfram Jost, Executive Board Member, IDS Scheer on Survival of the Process Fittest

In times of turmoil, change, and volatility – people and technology are in flux, but business thrive on the processes they run on. The consistency, speed, and quality of processes are what drives the delivery of products and services to customers and improves the bottom line. The companies surviving the economic storm have been process oriented all along. But becoming “process-fit” is more than applying BPM technology; it’s a cultural mindset.  This presentation focuses on what it takes to effectively use BPM to better survive troubling economic circumstances with a process-oriented mindset, culture, and technology.

David Broadbent, Business Process Consultant, Parity Solutions on How to Overcome Resistance to Change in Change Programmes

There have been many papers written about how business process management can yield benefits to organizations but not enough about dealing with the people aspects of change. David Broadbent presented a case study at the OMG BPM Think Tank in Putten Holland in November 2008 looking at the aspects of culture on change programmes, describing culture as the ‘forgotten variable’ in change programmes. Following ongoing work with a number of clients this talk will take some of the thoughts he presented to the next stage, namely how to resolve the ‘Resistance to change’.

Olivier Brousseau, IT Chief Architect, Oilfield Services IT division of Schlumberger, on Information for Excellence journey at Schlumberger, a SOA case study

Schlumberger launched at the end of 2007 a program called "Excellence in Execution" with a goal to deliver flawless execution to its customers. In 09, this remains a key strategy to ensure that the company comes out of the downturn changed and more competitive. Schlumberger’s customers are executing more difficult and much larger projects in more remote locations. This implies huge advances in technology to be able to recover hydrocarbons cost effectively. It also implies that the value of reliability in operations to our customers has increased dramatically.

Recognizing that Information and IT systems will play a key role in improving the business processes required to support this program, VP Quality and CIO of Schlumberger called for a step change in delivering information and IT systems. IfX, Information for Excellence, is the New standard to drive the organization towards field efficiency. The IfX will ensure that applications are field-friendly, that they minimize redundancy of information entry, improve control, and streamline field operations and processes.  The talk presents the IfX Journey at Schlumberger, and how SOA is a key enabler to deliver IfX compliant systems.

Tushar K. Hazra, PhD, Principal and Solution Architect, Distinguished Engineering Group Federal Consulting Practice, Computer Sciences Corporation, on Leveraging BPM and EA Connections for Building Your Transformation Enterprise, a case study

In today’s transformational business world, process innovation and improvements are keys to the successful delivery of tangible business values, agility, and performance.  Many companies and agencies start their BPM (business process management), EA (enterprise architecture), and SOA (service oriented architecture) initiatives independently to achieve such goals.  However, when BPM, and EA or SOA projects are connected early, significantly higher business benefits can be achieved than the outcome of their individual completions.  Practitioners can gain a deep understanding of processes from BPM. This knowledge can subsequently be utilized to establish a roadmap for building a transformational enterprise through EA and or SOA projects, in many occasions concurrently.

This session presents a case study of an ongoing joint BPM and EA initiative that leverages the true significance of managing business processes involved in EA.  The case study offers a commentary of the “what”, “how”, and “when” aspects of the initiative and shares relevant lessons learned.   

Fred A. Cummins, HP Fellow, on SOA for Business

SOA is about accessing shared business capabilities across organizational boundaries.  This means SOA is about the architecture of business, not just the composition of IT solutions.  The implications of this are far-reaching and affect not only the structure of business processes, but the structure of the organization and the means by which the enterprise is optimized and transformed.  This talk will provide an overview of SOA from a business perspective: the specification and integration of services, the implementation of business processes, the analysis of value chains, and the changes that are needed in enterprise governance for the enterprise to fully exploit the enabling technology.

Aleks Buterman, Principal, SenseAgility Group on Integration Capability Portfolio as Means of Competitive Advantage

What if you could integrate major mergers in weeks, rather than years?  What if you could accurately forecast integration value, cost and timelines?   Any organization armed with this set of core competencies would have a sizable competitive advantage in the marketplace.  These questions are not meant to spur debate, nor are they academic.  Processes and tools have progressed far enough over the past decade where building a capability portfolio focused on integration is no longer a state of the art.  Assessing and improving the effectiveness of this capability portfolio is crucial to organizations who use M&A as part of their growth strategy and investment professionals who underwrite and finance these deals.  This presentation will outline how capabilities enabled by Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), Business Process Management (BPM), and Master Data Management (MDM) can be assembled into an Integration Capability Portfolio that can be leveraged at any time, and with great velocity.

In addition to the above sessions, there will be panel discussions, an introduction to Business Ecology, the announcement of the SOA Consortium Case Study Contest winners, and open discussion time.

The SOA & BPM Symposium is a public event.  For more information on the agenda and registration, please go here.

New Podcast: Ronald Schmelzer of ZapThink on Growing your EA Skills and the Long Tail

Ronald Schmelzer, Managing Partner at ZapThink gave a lively talk on SOA Futures: Growing your EA Skills and the Long Tail, at the March 2009 meeting of the SOA Consortium in Washington DC. 

Schmelzer began by commenting on the inflexible, unreliable, unpredictable and non-compliant nature of enterprise systems.  Next, he spoke of the real digital divide – the technology experiences we have as consumers versus at work.  This divide is the equivalent of turning the clock back 10 years.

In diagnosing the problem, Schmelzer ruled out bad technologists, bad technology and inadequate investment.  In fact, enterprises are quite good at design and development.  The problem is not the artistry, but the engineering.  We lack the discipline to build durable systems that can meet new business needs for 10 years.

Equally troubling is that current IT practices – large buy and build projects – only satisfy a small portion of business opportunities.  Schmelzer describes this as the long tail of un-served business needs.  The keys lie in architecture, service-orientation and optimizing this equation: identifying the smallest number of services that enable the largest number of processes in the organization.

To hear Schmelzer’s advice on applying service-orientation to engineer durable solutions and view the slides go here. 

This is the seventh of eight podcasts recorded at our March meeting.  Previously, we released Sandy Carter’s Smart SOA in Tough Economic Climate, Dave Linthicum on Intersections of SOA and Cloud Computing, How SOA participates in a Green World Roundtable, Cory Casanave on Enterprise SOA modeling with SoaML, JP Morgenthal on Disassembling the SOA & BPM relationship and Todd Landry on Service Oriented Communications.  Next up, Mark Herring of Sun Microsystems on SOA is Dead?!?! Then, What are these Companies doing?

New Podcast: NEC Sphere’s Todd Landry on Service Oriented Communications

Todd Landry, SVP, NEC Sphere, spoke on taking a service-oriented approach to communications, at the March 2009 meeting of the SOA Consortium in Washington DC. 

Setting context for his talk, Landry spoke of the evolution in business communications, how private branch exchange (PBX) services have migrated from proprietary hardware switches, to IP based systems, to software based systems, in which voice is no longer the system, but just one of many business communication features.  Instead of locked in a closet, communication services are now available to business applications via an open standards based enterprise communications service cloud.

Landry pointed out that the most unpredictable, and highest latency, aspect of business processes and decision-making is human interaction.  By incorporating smart communications technology and collaboration mechanisms within business workflow, this latency is significantly reduced.  During his talk, Landry shared scenarios that occur across industries, including call center order monitoring and correlation, high volume hiring, and customer and supplier communications ‘integration at the glass’. 

Landry concluded his presentation with a demonstration of a first responder scenario that allowed responders across agencies to communicate both audibly and visually, incorporating individuals, incidents, state and geo-spatial elements.

To listen to an audio recording of Landry’s presentation and view the slides go here.

This is the sixth of several podcasts recorded at our March meeting.  Previously, we released Sandy Carter’s Smart SOA in Tough Economic Climate, Dave Linthicum on Intersections of SOA and Cloud Computing, How SOA participates in a Green World Roundtable, Cory Casanave on Enterprise SOA modeling with SoaML, and JP Morgenthal on Disassembling the SOA & BPM relationship.  Next up, Ronald Schmelzer of ZapThink on SOA Futures: Growing your EA Skills and the Long Tail.

New Podcast: JP Morgenthal disassembles the SOA & BPM relationship

JP Morgenthal, EA, SOA, BPM & Cloud Computing Strategist, gave a provocative talk on Disassembling the SOA & BPM Relationship at the March 2009 meeting of the SOA Consortium in Washington DC. 

JP opened with his contention that SOA and BPM are not the hand-in-hand partners that the technology press and vendors would like everyone to believe.  More so, SOA is not a prerequisite for BPM success.  In backing these assertions, JP described BPM as a practice that encompasses modeling, testing, implementing and measuring business processes, with supporting methodology to gather requirements, document processes, define KPIs, capture metrics, analyze results and optimize outcomes.

This view of BPM as a business discipline comes straight from the business practitioners whom JP interacts with on a regular basis.  The confusion on the SOA-BPM relationship comes from IT professionals, who solely focus on the execution engine (BPMS) of any BPM initiative.  As JP pointed out, many successful BPM initiatives have no underlying technology implementation. 

JP’s perspective provided for a lively discussion with meeting attendees.  The prevailing counter case was that SOA also has a business design element, that many businesses are organized as business services, with supporting process implementations.  A supporting point was that business personnel are more likely to think in terms of services than processes. 

To hear all of JP’s points and the attendee counter points, please go here.

This is the sixth fifth of several podcasts recorded at our March meeting.  Previously, we released Sandy Carter’s Smart SOA in Tough Economic Climate, Dave Linthicum on Intersections of SOA and Cloud Computing, How SOA participates in a Green World Roundtable, and Casanave on Enterprise SOA modeling with SoaML.  Next up, Todd Landry of NEC Sphere on Service-oriented Communications.

New Podcast & Slide Deck: Cory Casanave Introduces SoaML

Cory Casanave, CEO, Model Driven Solutions & ModelDriven.org, presented an overview of Enterprise SOA Modeling with the new OMG SoaML UML profile,  at the March 2009 meeting of the SOA Consortium in Washington DC. 

The SoaML (Service oriented architecture Modeling Language) specification describes a UML profile and metamodel for the design of services within a service-oriented architecture.  SoaML can be used for architecture level modeling, or as part of a model driven architecture (MDA) process, starting with a business model and transitioning through logical and physical models, resulting in technology implementation.

Casanave began by setting context, describing the rationale and objectives of SoaML,  how SoaML views a service (agreement between parties to exchange something),  the  top-down (business-driven) and bottoms-up (legacy-aware) usage paths, and the mapping of those paths to model driven architecture (MDA).

To bring the specification to life, Casanave walked through the artifacts related to a claims processing scenario, including the services architecture model (see below), business process model, service contract, participant interaction model, message types, service interface, service usage, participant model, composite application structure and information model. 

[Click on Picture to Enlarge]

Included in the example was the iteration of model detail as the process moved from business concept to logical model to systems model.  In a follow-on demonstration, Casanave highlighted the transition from physical model to technology implementation using ModelPro, a new open source tool.

To listen to an audio recording of the presentation portion of Casanave’s session and/or view the rest of the slides go here.  To view the SoaML specification, please go here.

New Podcast: Dave Linthicum on Intersections of SOA & Cloud Computing

David Linthicum, SOA expert, blogger and founder of Blue Mountain Labs, spoke on Finding the Intersections of SOA and Cloud Computing at the March 2009 meeting of the SOA Consortium in Washington DC. 

Linthicum opened by sharing the distinctions and connections between SOA and cloud computing. SOA is something you do, an architectural pattern. Cloud computing is an architectural option.

The value of SOA comes from having an architecture that readily accommodates change. The more your business changes, the more SOA pays for itself.  However, the initial build-out of SOA, prior to business change or service sharing, is cost-ineffective.  By incorporating cloud computing in SOA, the time to value is shortened because you leverage ‘other people’s work’.  The trick, Linthicum shares, is to determine which services, information, and processes are good candidates to reside in, come from, the clouds.

To determine the right mix of internal and external services for your SOA, Linthicum emphasizes starting with your architecture. Understand your business drivers, information under management, existing services under management and core business processes. A common failure pattern is jumping to the technology prior to understanding own issues.

Beyond understanding your issues, understand the state of cloud computing.  While there are safe, reliable offerings, cloud computing is at an early stage. Linthicum warned attendees to factor in integration costs and to beware of cloud interoperability and portability limitations.

For organizations contemplating extending SOA to the cloud, Linthicum suggests three preparatory actions.  First, accept the notion that it's okay to leverage external services as part of your SOA.  Second, create a strategy for the consumption and management of cloud services.  Third, create a proof of concept now.

To listen to an audio recording of Linthicums’s presentation and view the slides go here.

Keep an eye out for Dave’s new book on the convergence of SOA & Cloud Computing, to be released by Pearson this summer.

This is the first of several podcasts to be released from our DC meeting.  Next up, Sandy Carter on Smart SOA approach in a tough economic climate.