BPM / SOA Community Insights

BPM / SOA Case Study Contest: Deadline Extended to July 30, 2010

The news: By popular demand, we’ve extended the deadline on the Business Agility and Process Optimization enabled by Business Process Management (BPM) and Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) Case Study Competition.  Entries are due July 30, 2010.  Start your submission here. 

The refresher: the contest is open to organizations of all sizes, including government agencies, which have successfully delivered business or mission value using a BPM, SOA or combined BPM-SOA approach.

Similar to the SOA Consortium’s contests in 2008 -  2009, the goal of the BPM/SOA Case Study Competition is to highlight business success stories and lessons learned to provide proof points and insights for other organizations considering or pursuing BPM, SOA or combined BPM-SOA adoption. To qualify for the competition, the project must be complete with demonstrated business results.

Entries will be judged on the complexity of the business problem addressed, the ROI/Business Value achieved (Agility/Innovation/Flexibility/Optimization/Resilience/Service Delivery), the level and sophistication of the cross-organizational collaboration (Business/Technical) and the usage of BPM/SOA approaches and supporting technology. In addition to one overall winner, organizations will be recognized by industry/government.

Case Study Competition winners will be announced at the BPM/SOA CoP meeting in Cambridge MA on September 21, 2010 and will be featured on the BPM/SOA CoP website and in October publications by BPTrends, SearchSOA and SearchCIO.

Visit the contest homepage to learn about the guidelines, start the application, and meet the judges.  Submissions will be accepted through July 30, 2010.

BPM/SOA Community of Practice Session @ IBM Impact: Implementing BPM at Ford, Navy Federal CU & Major Bank

The BPM/SOA Community of Practice* is conducting a BPM practitioner panel at next week at IBM’s Impact Conference.  The session is Tuesday, May 4, at 1:30 PM local time.  If you want to learn about BPM implementation from real practitioners, this session is a must-attend:

TBE-1739A: BPM/SOA Consortium Speaks: Implementing BPM at Wells Fargo, Ford, and Navy Federal CU Venetian - Kevin Collins, Ford Motor Company; Jerry Hermes, Navy Federal Credit Union; Paul Tazbaz, Wells Fargo ; Richard Soley , OMG

Business Process Management and Business Process Modeling (both BPM) have been around for a while now, with positive impact on many organizations. One of the recent confusions about BPM implementations has been the hype around Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). The BPM/SOA Consortium, a part of the Business Ecology Initiative, has been focusing on dispelling that confusion and helping enterprises deliver optimization for innovation through well-governed Service Oriented Architectures that take advantage of business processes that have been captured, measured and delivered with Business Process Management. In this panel, BPM/SOA Consortium members, practitioners all, will talk about their adoption of the BPM approach with some focus on SOA, how they made the jump, how they convinced their management's, and how they managed to turn in measurable, positive ROI for their organizations.

* Yes, we did undergo a name change.  The BPM/SOA Consortium is now the BPM/SOA Community of Practice (CoP).  We wanted to eliminate any confusion with Standards submissions groups, often referred to as “Consortiums”.  (Who knew!)

MWD Advisors: Does your business process require a BPM Cathedral or Bazaar?

Neil Ward Dutton of MWD Advisors published an interesting opinion piece in CIO UK, As BPM goes mainstream, so the bazaar overtakes the cathedral.  The basic premise of the piece is that all business processes, and therefore all process improvement approaches, are not the same. 

Traditionally, process management has focused on large, complex processes with vast physical operations and resources, and therefore a rigorous, controlled, scientific method was called for:

“Process improvement has been part of the business landscape for many decades. For the vast majority of that time, improvement techniques were focused on processes which took big investments to get started or to change: manufacturing processes were at the heart of the picture. Not surprisingly, the people driving the process improvements took a very deliberate, scientific approach to recommending and making changes. Such an approach is essential in situations where there's a lot at stake, and in physical processes like those found in manufacturing, the costs and risks associated with suboptimal processes can be huge. The Six Sigma and Lean movements were both spawned from this environment.”

Borrowing from Eric S. Raymond’s Cathedral and Bazaar analogy, Neil classifies these initiatives as Cathedrals:

“The challenge with scientific process improvement and management methods is that they tend to create "cathedrals" [1] - closed environments where access to the tools of change is closely controlled. Now students of Lean techniques will say that lean thinking relies on empowering workers to drive continuous process improvement - but my contention is that in practice, in a great many organisations which consider themselves Lean thinkers, access to the tools of change is closely controlled by a select group.

This is precisely what you want where the cost or risk of cocking up is considerable…”

However, as Neil continues, the Cathedral model isn’t necessary, or even relevant, for all business process:

“Over the past couple of years, though, process management thinking and tools have now well and truly broken out of the domain of physical, capital-intensive processes to be applied to the worlds of knowledge work and service improvement. Here, the challenge associated with improvement and change is different.

If you're looking to improve a customer service process, the cost and risk of a suboptimal change is much lower than if you're changing a manufacturing plant layout - for one thing, you can probably make further changes to tweak things relatively straightforwardly. What's more, many customer service processes are so poorly understood that even a suboptimal improvement - a kind of "good enough for now" change - can yield massive results. In these kinds of processes, business agility tends to be much more of a key consideration than the cost or risk of making suboptimal changes.

…

Where business agility is the number one concern, it pays to look at how to drive change without relying on a cathedral to house your priests. The ‘bazaar' model (to once again refer to Eric Raymond) - which explicitly aims to throw open access to tools and information to a broad audience of interested parties and contributors - is very interesting here, because (with the right nurturing) it can create an environment where acceptance of process change is a natural by-product of the process improvement work.”

The change acceptance point is one that Neil expands upon as he discusses a variety of BPM offerings.  We are solution agnostic here, so I’m skipping that section.

Neil concludes with a discussion on the fit and outcomes of BPM cathedrals and bazaars.  [Emphasis is mine.]

“None of this is to say that scientific methods and approaches to process improvement are worthless or that they have lost their relevance. There are many situations where a highly structured approach to process improvement, driven by highly trained specialists, will continue to be the best approach. But the BPM market in 2010 is a market that's increasingly dominated by tools, technologies and approaches that lean much more towards the philosophy of the bazaar rather than of the cathedral.

To me, the biggest value of the former philosophy over the latter is the way that where a cathedral-like approach to process change tends to focus everyone's minds on the quality of the design of an improvement, the natural outcome of a bazaar-like philosophy is improved quality of the ultimate outcome - that is, the acceptance of the change or improvement by those people it impacts on a day-to-day basis. A beautifully-designed process improvement is one thing, but if it's not accepted then you're screwed. And in knowledge work and service improvement scenarios, where people are the product, acceptance is all.”

As you pursue BPM initiatives, keep in mind the business problem you are solving, and if a Cathedral or Bazaar is best.

Read the article.

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.

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.

SOA Consortium Declares Mission Success, Announces Future Plans

  Today, the SOA Consortium declared success on its advocacy mission to help the Global 1000, major government agencies and mid-market business successfully adopt SOA by 2010.  The SOA Consortium’s declaration is supported by recent industry research, the high value case studies submitted to its case study contest, and industry momentum around business and technology strategies that are dependent upon a SOA foundation.

From today’s press release:

“When the SOA Consortium began, SOA 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, we see corporations large and small using the principles of SOA to enhance their overall business and technology strategies,” said Richard Mark Soley, executive director, SOA Consortium. “As we move forward in the drive towards Business Ecology, the combined BPM/SOA Consortium will continue to engage with the business community to show how SOA can be a valuable part of their business optimization efforts.”

According to Gartner Vice President and Distinguished Analyst W. Roy Schulte, “the term ‘SOA’ was coined by Gartner, and Gartner published the first reports on it in 1996. However, widespread mainstream adoption only appeared after 2005. SOA is a durable change in application architecture, like the relational database and graphical user interface. It is the natural evolution of distributed computing — it is distributed computing done right. SOA is already the dominant architectural style for business applications. Virtually all CIOs are somewhere on the road to SOA, either starting or far along. SOA principles are timeless; no replacement is in sight.”

In a recent conversation with Joe McKendrick, Forrester’s Randy Heffner spoke of SOA adoption levels that match the SOA Consortium’s goal of 75% adoption rates by the Global 1000 by 2010.

“By the end of this year, 75% of the global 2000, that’s folks with 20,000 or more employees, say that they’ll be using SOA,” Randy continues. “When we asked, ‘Are you satisfied?’ roughly 25% says that SOA has provided most or all of the benefits that they expected. There’s another 30 to 40% that said, ‘It’s provided less than we expected, but still enough benefit that we’re expanding our use of SOA.’”

Interestingly, in that conversation, Heffner pointed out the greatest success comes from business-driven SOA approaches, exactly what the SOA Consortium has been advocating from the onset.

“What do the 25% moving full force into SOA have in common? “They’re treating SOA as a business-design concept,” Randy says. “That sets a whole different perspective on how you view the kinds of services that you’re building, the methods that you put around it.””

In addition to declaring victory, the SOA Consortium announced its future plans to merge with OMG’s BPM Consortium:

“The SOA Consortium will be continuing its advocacy efforts as part of the new BPM/SOA Consortium, which also ties in with the Business Ecology™ Initiative. The Business Ecology Initiative is focused on erasing the constraining lines between business and Information Technology (IT) so that IT becomes a ubiquitous, integral and vital asset to the company and leads decision-making, structural change and enterprise-wide quality initiatives, drives efficiency and revenue, and provides measurable, clear return on investment.”

SOA Consortium Activities and Transition

Timing:  The merger between the SOA and BPM Consortiums will be completed by 2009 year end.  The first event of the merged BPM/SOA Consortium is the BPM and SOA in the Clouds Symposium, to be held December 8-9, 2009, in Long Beach, CA.  Organizations and individuals interested in participating in that program should refer to this open call for participation.

Working Groups:  With the completion of the 2009 SOA Consortium | CIO magazine case study contest, the Executive Suite SOA working group has completed its charter. 

SOA Community of Practice is working on an “Everyday SOA” paper that describes the key concepts in our services, portfolios, management units and IT landscape diagram.  The group intends to deliver the paper in December 2009.

The Enterprise Architecture in the 2010s working group is working on a discussion oriented position paper on how a formalized business architecture contributes to Business and IT success.  

SOA Consortium Publications:  All SOA Consortium publications (papers, podcasts, presentations, blog posts) will remain available to the public at their current locations.  This includes the forthcoming working group papers.

Consortium Leadership: The joint BPM / SOA Consortium will be managed by Karen Larkowski, current program director of the BPM Consortium and General Manager of the Business Ecology Initiative.

Thank You!

On a personal note, I’d like to thank everyone who has contributed to the success of the SOA Consortium.  This long list starts with our members and sponsors, and includes all invited speakers, executive summit and symposium attendees, our pundit friends (analysts, press, bloggers, thought leaders), the OMG team, and every SOA practitioner who raised the bar (and value) in his/her organization from SOA as “just a bunch of web services” (JBOWS) to SOA Means Business.

What are real people doing with SOA?

A frequent question to the SOA Consortium is “What are real people doing with SOA?”.  Sure, folks see and appreciate the winning case studies.  But, what about the “every organization”.  What problems, or opportunities, are being resolved using a SOA approach?  What’s the best place to start?  Top-down from business strategy?  Bottoms-up from IT projects? Somewhere in the middle? 

This is best answered in three parts, starting by level-setting on business-driven SOA. 

By “business-driven SOA”, we mean three things:

1. Creating a portfolio of services that represent capabilities offered by, or required of, your organization.  Those capabilities may represent business, information, or technology concepts.

2. Composing, or orchestrating, those services along with events, rules and policies, into business processes and solutions that fulfill business scenarios.

3. Never proceed without a business outcome in mind.  That “business outcome” could be cost and complexity reduction via a rationalized IT portfolio.  In other words, “business-driven” doesn’t require a business person tapping you on the shoulder, it means executing for business reasons.

Next, our take on “SOA initiatives”, which is, there shouldn’t be any.  Rather, there should only be business initiatives that (when appropriate) use a SOA approach.  Sure, it sounds like semantic nit-picking, but in actuality it’s a lesson from the trenches.  Focus on the business problem, not the SOA grand challenge. 

As you know, business initiatives can arise from strategic decisions, business architecture/design decisions, and/or operational results.  And since SOA can be applied to a variety of business situations, it only makes sense that SOA can appear at point, from strategy to operations.  In other words, there is no best starting point, only the best starting point for you.

As these business initiatives are further refined in planning and execution, business and implementation details are surfaced, which also may call for a SOA approach.  For example, Joint Business and IT Planning activities may surface common process, function and/or information needs, across projects.  These are potential drivers for a SOA approach.

This business and IT activity continuum is expressed by the blue, green and yellow boxes, and grey arrows and boundaries, in the diagram below.  While blue represents business activities, and yellow represents IT activities, we’ve learned that the most successful organizations spend their time in the green, where business and IT continuously collaborate.

Finally, the business scenarios.  Referring to the diagram below, in each column of the continuum, we’ve listed real world SOA approach drivers.  For example, strategic business initiatives that have benefited from a SOA approach include introducing new business capability, entering a new or adjacent market, integrating mergers and acquisitions, and introducing multi-channel strategies. 

We captured these drivers during interactions with practitioners (real people) over the last three years.  These interactions included our executive summit series, our community of practice discussions, invited speakers at our events, case study contest submissions, and the thousands of practitioners we’ve met via industry events, private forums, and in their conference rooms.

SOA Approach Drivers Diagram, October 2009 version

[Click on diagram to enlarge]