SOA Consortium Insights

New Podcast: IBM's Ed Lynch on SOA & Event Processing via BPM

Day two of the SOA Consortium’s June Meeting focused on combining SOA and Event Processing to deliver business capability. Ed Lynch, Product Manager for the BPM & Connectivity portfolio, and Integration Exec for the Aptsoft acquisition, IBM Corporation, kicked off the morning by sharing his view that SOA and Event Processing come together within Business Process Management.

In building his case, Ed first called out the findings of IBM’s Enterprise of the Future CEO study, which speaks to a business environment of accelerating change, brought on by globalization, constant connectivity, doubling data and burgeoning competition. To cope with this torrent of change, executives require two things. First, they need visibility into their businesses, in real-time. Second, those businesses need to be agile. Businesses must be able to respond quickly to opportunities and threats, or risk losing market share to existing or new competitors.

With that business backdrop, Ed shared the basic constructs of event processing and then made the connection to services and business processes. In short, Ed told attendees to think of events as the “when” for the “what” of services. Business processes orchestrate the what, the services, to respond to an event, or a series of events.

Bridging the conceptual and reality, Ed described several customer examples, including fleet management, customer loyalty programs, algorithmic trading, business activity monitoring and fraud detection.

Throughout the presentation, Ed engaged in Q&A with attendees on a range of topics including management practices, data swarms, rule management and event processing futures.

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

Ed's talk is the fifth of eight podcasts recorded at the June meeting, and the first of three from our SOA & Event Processing day. 

Earlier, we released Mel Greer's talk on SOA Hard Problems & Spiral Solution Development,  Jim Johnson's talk on SOA Trends & Pipelining, David Butler's talk on SOA Transformation and K. Scott Morrison on How to Fail at SOA. 

SOA, BPM and the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man -- Hot Topics Roundtable Podcast Now Avaliable

At our Jacksonville SOA Consortium Meeting, we held our second SOA Hot Topics Roundtable.  This quarter, we explored the relationship between SOA and BPM.  I asked our invited guests, Ashwini Ahuja from SDG Corporation, Sooraj Balgobin from The SOA Monitor and Brian Erickson from Hitachi Consulting to speak to one of four aspects of the SOA-BPM relationship:

1. Business Discipline

2. Methodology

3. Technology

4. Human Element

Similar to our SOA Governance Roundtable, the insights and conversation was pitch-free.  After each thought leader shared his opening insights, we launched into a roundtable discussion with all meeting attendees.  Many of the participants will be familiar as they are leading SOA practitioners.

The entire podcast is a little over an hour, the roundtable begins about 25 minutes in, and the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man is discussed during Brian Erickson's opening remarks.  I also shared the SOA Consortium's view that SOA and BPM are complements.

Go here to listen to the podcast, view the slides, or read the full transcript.  As always, let us know what you think. 

For our December Hot Topics Roundtable, we've lined up Sandy Carter of IBM, Judith Hurwitz and our own Richard Soley.  We'll be addressing CIO level concerns, such as talking SOA with the CEO and SOA skills identification and development.  If you have suggestions for a future roundtable topic, please drop me an email brenda at soa-consortium dot org.

SOA Consortium at BPM Think Tank

This week, I'm representing the SOA Consortium at BPM Think Tank.  Why an SOA advocacy group at a BPM event?  Simple.  During our first Executive Summit series in February, 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 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.

The SOA Consortium shares this view.  SOA and BPM are complementary strategies.  Each delivers business value on its own.  But, used together, the business value amplifies.

While I'm here, I'll be participating on a SOA and BPM panel, and I'll be engaging in conversations with BPM community leaders on how we can collaborate to "break the artificial divide between SOA and BPM".

If you are using SOA and BPM together and would like to share your insights and/or stories, feel free to leave a comment, or send me an email: brenda at soa-consortium.org

TechTarget and Gartner events

Last week I presented at two events representing the Consortium.  Unfortunately both of them (TechTarget's CIO Decisions conference and Gartner's Application Architecture, Development & Integration Summit) were literally on the same days.  Unfortunately, they were not literally in the same city.  Or even the same state.

Thank you American Airlines for being on-time!  The solution was to cover the TechTarget CIO conference in Carlsbad very quickly and then run off to Nashville for the Gartner conference, which I did.  I hope to not have to do that again, as the CIO event was excellent-200 CIO's, by invitation only, and the quality was superb.  The keynoter, André Mendes (CIO of the Special Olympics) delivered a stirring call to arms to CIO's to be leaders, innovaters and transformers in their organizations.  Delivering that message to the SOA Consortium community, including CIO's, business analysts & enterprise architects, is important and I'm talking about that with him.  My presentation (”Making the SOA Leap) gave an overview of what we are doing and some early results.  There was definitely interest in participation from the CIO's on-site, and we are following up.

Even more exciting, however, was the Gartner event in Nashville.  While I was in Carlsbad, John Turato (CTO of Avis Budget Group) gave a keynote representing the SOA Consortium.  I'm hoping to hear that soon as obviously I couldn't hear it on that day.

Of the 800 or so attendees at the conference, about 230-250 came to the SOA Consortium session on Wednesday in which Yefim Natis (Gartner Vice President & Distinguished Analyst) and I co-chaired a panel of SOA Consortium participants.  These included Nida Davis Roemer (CTO of the American Red Cross), Yoav Intrator (Chief Architect of Deutsche Bank) and our own Ground-Floor SOA leader, Surekha Durvasula (Kohl's Department Stores).  Though I came prepared with questions, the audience began participating even before our panelists had a chance to finish giving two-minute position statements!  We're working with Gartner to get audios of the panel (and John Turato's talk) available from the SOA Consortium web site and here on this blog).  Watch this space for more information.

There's no question that Service Oriented Architecture was the hottest topic at the Gartner event, and there was plenty of buzz after the panel about it being one of the most useful events at the conference.  At the end of the panel I summed up the discussion with the five themes that I felt came out of the discussion:

• Modeling Counts.  Of course, as Chairman of the Object Management Group also, that wasn't a surprise to me!  In fact OMG is working on SOA modeling standards.  The interesting by-product of modeling SOA systems, however, was pointed out by an audience member: that modeling provides a "”common ground" for business & IT to agree and work together.

• Business Agility is the Strategic Driver.  This isn't a surprise to any follower of the Consortium!  But it certainly was good to hear it, many times.  SOAP and WSDL and UDDI aren't the issue: strategic development and integration are.  All the panelists and several audience members made it clear that which technology is used for integration is a distant second to focusing development on integration.

• Most Shops are Already Doing SOA.  This came out of a short discussion of what SOA is and isn't; there was very general agreement that it isn't a new idea, and even late-adopters are probably already "”doing SOA."

• Measure, Measure, Measure.  If the point is being able to easily integrate and re-orchestrate existing processes, then the quality and performance of those processes are important!  Metrics are critical for business process that are going to be heavily leveraged.

• Sharing Experience is Critical.  Well that doesn't surprise any of us either; that's the point of the SOA Consortium, to share our experiences.

Discussions on other topics - standards, SOA hype, and the complementarity of BPM and SOA - fit very well with the results from our Executive Summits and the roadmaps of where the Consortium is headed.  This was some great visibility for the SOA Consortium (and it appears it will be a source of several new members as well!).