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.

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.

Community Insights: Services, Business Solutions, Portfolios, Management Units & Clouds (continued)

Last month, I shared some of our Community of Practice’s work in flight regarding services, portfolios, management units, and the fit within the overall IT landscape.  At the time, the following diagram best represented our on-going conversation.  [Click on diagram to enlarge]

Along with the diagram, I posed some questions for broader community feedback:

1.  Has your organization’s management perspective shifted away from business solutions (applications, business process implementations) to business capabilities/functions?  If so, in which areas: IT funding, IT delivery, IT operations, and/or IT product management?

2. Are you engaging in service portfolio management practices, such as service value prediction and assessment, marketing, sourcing, rationalization, refresh, and retirement?  If so, what techniques and/or tools are you employing?

For example, to manage service sprawl that began from federated service development and was compounded by a merger, one of our members is considering marketplace techniques, both real and predictive, to let developers choose which of a redundant set of services survives, rendering the less popular obsolete.

3.  Who manages the service portfolio?  How does this compare, contrast with the management of the business solution and IT asset portfolios?

Since that post, our group continued its discussion, which is reflected in this updated version of the Services, Portfolios, Management Units & Clouds diagram.  [Click on diagram to enlarge]

 

The major changes:

1. Explicitly stated a usage relationship between the IT Delivery Value Chains and the Service Portfolio.
2. Assigned management responsibility of the Service Portfolio to the Enterprise Architecture group, and declared that the Service Portfolio is part of the Enterprise Architecture Portfolio. (answered our question #3)
3. Indicated the Business Capability map is one of many Business Architecture Artifacts, and that those Business Architecture Artifacts are managed as part of the Enterprise Architecture Portfolio.
4. Explicitly stated the business-driven relationship between Business Capability criticality and Project Portfolio prioritization.
5. Collapsed the Cloud Service view into the main diagram.
6. Noted the specific management policies at each portfolio, recognizing the need for federated policy administration, communication, and enforcement, or as Todd Biske would say, “governance”.

We welcome your feedback on any aspect of our evolved diagram, as well as your thoughts on the following questions. (Question #3 is new)

1.  Has your organization’s management perspective shifted away from business solutions (applications, business process implementations) to business capabilities/functions?  If so, in which areas: IT funding, IT delivery, IT operations, and/or IT product management?

2. Are you engaging in service portfolio management practices, such as service value prediction and assessment, marketing, sourcing, rationalization, refresh, and retirement?  If so, what techniques and/or tools are you employing?

For example, to manage service sprawl that began from federated service development and was compounded by a merger, one of our members is considering marketplace techniques, both real and predictive, to let developers choose which of a redundant set of services survives, rendering the less popular obsolete.

3. Is your organization using, or considering, ITIL V3 to manage the full service lifecyle from inception (business architecture) through development/consumption (IT Delivery Value Chains), operations (IT asset and runtime management) and product management (service portfolio management)?

Please share any thoughts on the post, and/or our direct questions, via comment, blog post, or discussion forum.  Just link to this post, we’ll find you.

Enterprise Architecture 2010 Talk-- Where EA Means Business -- at SAP ASUG on May 5, 2008

On Monday, I'll be representing the SOA Consortium's EA2010 working group at SAP's ASUG conference in, you guessed it, sunny Orlando.  I'll be giving a talk on our EA2010 work.  Areas of discussion include 21st century business, service-orientation, business architecture, enterprise architecture and enterprise architects.  If you are attending the show, please come by, Monday at 9:30-10:30, in 308C. 

If you'd like to connect at the show, I'll be at the Sunday evening ESOA Community Networking Session and taking in sessions and wandering around the expo floor on Monday.  Drop me an email at bmichelson at gmail dot com.

Enterprise Architecture 2010: Questions for EA, SOA and Business Architecture Communities

Have you had a chance to check out our new released EA2010 webcast and position deck?  If you did, great.  If not, no worries.  You can still participate in the discussion.  In our work, we call out the importance of business architecture as organizations progress with service-orientating their business and IT operations.  (Yes, SOA as a strategy.  No, SOA as a technology.)

As you can imagine, we had a lot of healthy (and some circular) discussion as we were working on the EA2010 material.  In the end, we decided we would publish the frame, and use it to solicit feedback and insight.

Some of the questions we would love the broader EA, SOA and Business Architecture communities to chime in on are:

1. Do you agree that Business Architecture as an important emerging enterprise architecture discipline?  Does your organization already practice business architecture?  If so, formally or informally?

2. Where will/do business architects come from?  Are these business savvy technologists?  Technology savvy business professionals?  Today's business analysts?  Other?

3. Assuming Enterprise Architecture 2010 encompasses not only today's technology laden "enterprise architecture" but also Business Architecture, where will it report?  Is this still an IT function?  Does it report to a business executive?

Please share your thoughts with us, as a comment on this post, via a trackback from your blog, or drop me an email brenda at soa-consortium dot org.  If you have other thoughts on the EA2010 work, please share those as well.