BPM / SOA Community Insights

EA2010: The Business of Successful Enterprise Architecture Practices

[Update @ 7:33 PM ET on June 14, 2010: Changed call time from 12:00 PM to 1:00PM]

We’re back!  Since early 2007, the 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. 

The major domains we identified are: technology architecture; business architecture; projects alignment; delivery; operations and measurement; and governance and enterprise architecture management.

A critical finding of the group discussion 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.

In pursuit of this re-balancing, in 2009 the EA2010 team pursued a line of discussion and research on the purpose, practices and realities of expanding, or in some cases starting, business architecture practices.  This work stream culminated in the publication of an EA2010 Business Architecture whitepaper. 

Starting in June 2010, EA2010 will pursue a new line of discussion and research focusing on the business aspects of successful enterprise architecture practices.  Items for discussion include:

•    Establishing and sustaining credibility with business and IT constituents
•    Business Outcome rather than Business Model alignment
•    Injecting financial measurement and decision-making acumen into EA
•    Catalyzing a business architecture practice

All members of the BPM/SOA Community of Practice are welcome to participate in the EA2010 Working Group.  Our re-start call is Wednesday, June 23, 2010 at 12:00 PM 1:00 PM ET.  For more information, see the EA2010 working group page, or contact Becky Higgins or me.

Going to IBM Innovate? Smarter Business Planning and Analysis: Business Architecture as a Foundation

If you are going to IBM Innovate, the Rational Software Conference, plan to attend our session on Wednesday afternoon.  I’m co-presenting with IBM’s Robert Shields on Business Architecture as a Foundation to Business Planning, Analysis and Change. 

My part of the presentation, is based on themes and outcomes from the SOA Consortium’s EA2010 group.  As always, expect a fair amount of business talk and definite traceability to business motivations. 

The details:

Session: EAM-2259: Smarter Business Planning and Analysis: Business Architecture as a Foundation
Date/Time: Wed, 9/Jun, 03:00 PM - 04:00 PM
Room: Dolphin - Oceanic 7
Co-presenter(s): Robert Shields, IBM, Senior Market Manager, Enterprise Architecture, Brenda M. Michelson, Elemental Links

Hope to see you next week! 

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.

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 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.

SOA Case Study Contest Special Recognition Winner: BlueStar Energy for NextStar™

Yesterday, we announced that BlueStar Energy is the special recognition winner for Energy/Utility in the SOA Consortium | CIO magazine case study contest.  Highlights from the BlueStar Energy Case follow. 

Company Background

BlueStar Energy is an independent retail electric supplier, certified to sell electricity in Illinois, Maryland and the District of Columbia. In addition, BlueStar provides green power and energy efficiency solutions to home and business customers.

Business Scenario

Business Agility: BlueStar’s business is in a very fluid regulatory environment. Business conditions change all the time, and the IT infrastructure has to adapt to those changes immediately. The BlueStar executive team formulated a strong strategy and needed a foundation for business execution.

Unite Business & Technology: In mid 2006, BlueStar sponsored an enterprise-wide SOA initiative to unite business and technology based on a strategic enterprise vision to increase competitive advantage. The goal was to provide BlueStar with a rock-solid IT platform and digitized business processes to automate the company's core capabilities.

Enterprise Architecture Evolution:  BlueStar adopted the concepts of a mature EA methodology and embraced service orientation (SOA) as their enterprise architecture style. The EA methodology allow the CTO to make tough decisions about which processes BlueStar had to execute well, then implement the IT systems needed to automate those processes.

NextStar™: The enterprise architecture would be named NextStar™ (for the “next” BlueStar) with the goal of streamlining and automating core business processes including eCommerce, B-to-B Integration, Accounting, Automated Provisioning, Risk/Energy Management, Pricing and Product Management, Sales Force Automation, Customer Relationship Management and Billing Systems. Millions of dollars in revenue are tied to timely access to information and the ability to act on that information.

Incremental Delivery: Key to BlueStar’s success was thinking big and starting small—partitioning BlueStar into narrowly defined business domains, processes and services, building out features iteratively, and, showing early value and success—instead of attempting to define the architecture for the entire company at once.

Their services and applications have been architected leveraging SOA constructs such as standard-based interface, consumer heterogeneity, loosely coupling, and, composability, among others. Said services and applications as well as existing legacy systems, workflows and third-party service providers interact with each other in a standard, loosely coupled manner via their Business Integration Suite, which consists of open source distributed, scalable and reliable components such as enterprise service bus, business process management system and messaging fabric.

ROI

BlueStar’s CEO Guy Morgan attributes much of the company's recent growth to the NextStar initiative. BlueStar has grown 12,197% over five years.

In addition to growth contribution, between the adoption of enterprise architecture, open source and offshore development, the company estimates saving $24 million over the course of five (5) years.

Business benefits:

• Improve business agility by streamlining core business processes, accelerating supply chain integration and providing business tools to offer new products in new geographies for new demographics, at an attractive price
• Reduce business operational expense and cycle time through automation of manual processes and seamless integration with trading partners and value-added vendor-supplied services
• Position the company to compete with Illinois utilities to serve residential and small-business customers after the discounted rate the state required utilities to charge for 10 years, ended in January 2007
• 50% reduction in billing staff
• Met per account operational cost targets for small business and residential customers through 100% automation of account management
• Ability to cope with frequent regulatory requirements changes from states where BlueStar operates
• Ability to enter new energy markets such as natural gas
• Ability to either in-source or outsource business processes to respond to market conditions
• Facilitate merger and acquisition (M&A) activity due to likely industry consolidation

IT benefits:

• Ability to scale from thousands of customers to tens of millions of customers nationwide
• Serve as a foundation for massively scalable solutions
• 10% reduction in IT expense associated with enrollment and billing processing
• Reduced IT capital investment and ongoing operational expense through 100% use of open source technologies

Project Organization

Business & IT Collaboration: From inception to deployment, this project has been a collaborative effort between business and technology teams. As a first step in the governance and change management areas, BlueStar established a Steering Committee comprising the company’s executives. Then, with executive management sponsorship, the company formed several domain-based change control boards consisting of multi-disciplinary teams including business, legal and IT members. The change control board members meet weekly to discuss prioritization, progress, change and control management, and release planning.

In-house Effort: NextStar was developed 100% in house. The Chief Technology Officer, Director of Enterprise Architecture and Lead Solutions Architect worked in Chicago, IL. Software Engineering and Quality Assurance teams worked in Lima, Peru.

Enterprise Architecture: The Enterprise Architecture team was responsible for providing leadership, mentorship and oversight of the Business, Solutions, Information and Technology Architectures, all of this under the SOA paradigm.

Lessons

BlueStar discovered early on that these actions would make the project more successful:

• Increased focus on program management (strategy) versus project management (tactical)
• Importance to address and agree on budgetary planning and allocation
• More strict adoption of the architecture and software engineering methodologies
• More strict management and governance of IT assets

SOA Case Study Contest Winner: Cisco Systems IT for Commerce Transformation

Moments ago, we announced that Cisco Systems IT won top honors in the SOA Consortium | CIO magazine case study contest.  Highlights from the Cisco IT Case follow. 

Company Background

Cisco Systems, Inc. designs, manufactures and sells hardware, software and services to create Internet and networked based solutions.

Business Scenario

Inconsistent, Disconnected Business Processes: Cisco’s legacy infrastructure had more than 400 diverse applications, many of which supported products and services that had been developed and acquired over the years. Consequently, several core business processes such as product ordering and pricing were becoming inconsistent, monolithic, complex, and inflexible to change. A lack of comprehensive end-to-end monitoring was also a concern.

Disjointed Customer Experience: While customers could initiate nearly all their orders electronically, most still required employee assistance for completion. Customers also had to use multiple online applications. The overall customer experience was far from unified, essentially impeding the flow of company revenue. Numerous initiatives were underway to improve the situation, further complicating the process.

Quest for Unified Customer Experience: Cisco wanted to create a consistent, unified ordering experience for users of its online commerce applications. Ideally, customers, partners, and sales representatives could visit a single Cisco site to securely register an opportunity, configure products, place and track orders, renew maintenance agreements, or evaluate leasing options, all from a unified interface. Cisco also wanted to improve operational efficiency by reducing the number of online transactions that required human intervention.

Commerce Transformation Initiative: The aptly named “Commerce Transformation” initiative is based on SOA principles that have allowed Cisco IT to create a solid architectural and technology foundation for both existing and future application development. Commerce Transformation was chosen as a key proof point for SOA adoption for several reasons. Support for large business priorities was driving significant IT application investment. Numerous business capabilities were identified that would be ideal as reusable services - and the IT organization was ready to embrace SOA principles. Cisco also wanted to achieve differentiated business capabilities to maintain its leading market position.

Early Use Case: Since most of Cisco’s revenues come through partner channels, one of the first projects developed within the Commerce Transformation initiative was the Partner Deal Registration (PDR) application. Before PDR was developed, application access to business services such as pricing and configuration resided behind Cisco’s firewall. This required Cisco employees to manually help partners integrate these services into their systems, prolonging deal cycle times.

PDR was designed to give partners secure access to Cisco pricing concessions and programs, leveraging reusable enterprise-class business services such as corporate pricing, configuration, and partner profiles that were coupled with flexible business rules for price lists, contractual discounts, and promotions, among others. Existing functionality such as pricing could be wrapped into a reusable business service that partners could easily incorporate into their own processes. Granular services could then be combined to provide composite services, with the ultimate goal of an agile Business Process Management (BPM) implementation. The expectation was that developers could effectively combine services to quickly offer new value-added capabilities.

At the same time, this approach would ensure that key business services were available consistently and securely across the enterprise and would simplify their incorporation into partner commerce portals.

ROI

The Commerce Transformation initiative is already delivering scalable solutions, enhancing customers’ experiences, and providing the partner ecosystem with secure access to business services like pricing, promotions and configuration tools. It also allows Cisco to more easily and cost-effectively support new business models and enter new markets.

The solution leverages reusable enterprise-class business services such as corporate pricing, configuration, and partner profiles, coupled with business rules such as price lists, contractual discounts, and promotions.

Key benefits achieved from the PDR project:

• Improved process agility: The way quotes are priced can be rapidly changed, enabling processes such as stacking discounts and promotions.
• Growth: There has been steady growth in the number of partners, deals, and bookings. Six months after initial project rollout, the system had more than 9,000 partner users worldwide and had processed 37,000 deals worth $1.2 billion. Nearly a year later in June 2009, there were close to 20,000 partner users, and 56,000 deals worth $3.92 billion net had been processed.
• Productivity: Deal cycle time has been reduced by 50 percent, allowing sales representatives to focus on providing customers with value-add solutions and services. The volume of time consuming non-standard deals has shrunk by using upfront pricing and incentives. Since the project’s pilot rollout in September 2007, the company has realized estimated savings of $12.7 million through improvements in discounting trends and reductions in non-standard pricing. More than 18,000 man-hours of productivity have been gained by eliminating unnecessary administrative tasks for field sales team members.
• Detailed tracking: A SOA dashboard provides deep visibility into service usage and delivers data that enables service architects to continually improve services.
• Improved customer experience: The number of clicks and time to place an order have been reduced. Users receive consistently correct pricing regardless of quoting or ordering process, making it easier to conduct business with Cisco. Pricing functionality can be smoothly integrated into partner systems.
• Increased back-end efficiency: Almost 70 percent of quotes are processed with no human intervention. The pricing service is now centrally managed to reduce overhead. Business Rules Engine integration provides faster, more accurate decision-making.
• Faster time to market: The reusable pricing service improves time to market as the company sells into new markets and embraces new business models.
• Better compliance: Built-in compliance processes provide the required audit trails.

Partners now have self-service access to incentive programs, promotions, and return merchandise credit capabilities that previously required direct contact with a Cisco salesperson. Quotes initiated by partners through PDR can now be shared with Cisco sales representatives using Salesforce.com for further opportunity collaboration, increased productivity, and reduced cycle time. The PDR application has been localized in 15 different languages in 150 different countries around the world.

Project Organization

Boards and Councils: Cisco’s “boards and councils” governance model was critical to the success of the Commerce Transformation initiative. Cross-functional councils comprising business and IT leaders were tasked with the planning and execution of an integrated capabilities roadmap. The roadmap was developed collaboratively across teams representing different functional groups, initiatives, and capabilities.

Before the roadmap was defined, pricing capabilities were spread across multiple IT and business organizations. To provide reusable SOA-based pricing services that could be used by the PDR and other applications, the councils had to identify business rules and processes that led to the definition of a target pricing service.

SOA Project Team: Once the roadmap was finalized, a SOA project team consisting of their Enterprise Architecture team, Business Architects and IT Architects evaluated the use of SOA. As functional, operational and compliance requirements were assessed, the need for a companywide SOA platform was established. Several areas of concern associated with developing pricing as a set of business services were identified, including availability, performance, security, operational excellence, and governance. The team also evaluated existing capabilities and gaps in technology.

SOA Framework & Platform: Working closely with their business and IT counterparts, the EA team began building a framework for the identification, creation, reuse, governance and monitoring of services and composite applications. The SOA platform and framework were developed by matching Cisco’s business needs and long-term strategy with products and solutions available in the market. This early work greatly streamlined the implementation of new capabilities for many other teams within Cisco and generated positive feedback from business stakeholders.

Center of Excellence: The EA team acts as the Center of Excellence for SOA and BPM and is responsible for building the foundation for all current and future SOA and BPM initiatives. They focus heavily on the areas of concern identified during the SOA assessment to ensure a solid foundation for enterprise-class business services.

Lessons

• SOA is not about technology, but rather how you implement, operate, and govern it. A large-scale enterprise SOA rollout requires maturity from people, processes, and technology as well as grassroots-level adoption.
• SOA and BPM go hand-in-hand. Plan for it in advance.
• A combination of iterative top-down and bottom-up approaches results in faster realization of SOA benefits.
• SOA introduces additional challenges with distributed business services. The SOA technology platform must be architected for the enterprise rather than focusing on a project-by-project basis.
• The organizational model of councils, groups and collective decision-making was initially painful but important to the success, funding and adoption of this project.
• Initial success stories go a long way in creating awareness, confidence and enterprise adoption of a SOA platform. The team has seen tremendous adoption of the SOA platform after the initial success of the highly visible PDR project.
• High availability, performance and end-to-end visibility of services infrastructure are paramount for long-term sustainability of SOA-based solutions.
• When you are a large company, most of the benefits will come from volume, so target simple things (services) with high volume.
• Governance is most needed when you are about to be most successful. If you don’t have it, you will fail.

To learn even more about Cisco’s SOA approach, check out this podcast of Lead Architect Harvinder Kalsi, recorded at the December 2008 SOA Consortium meeting.  Don’t have time for the podcast, at a minimum grab the slides.  The service lifecycle approach slide is outstanding.

@ SOA | BPM Symposium: Marc Redemann, IDS Scheer

Session Abstract:

Marc Redemann, Director of BPM Consulting, 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.

Redemann opens up talking about BPM market evolution over last 10 years.  BPM market in US, for IDS Scheer, is very IT driven.  Redemann reminds us that IDS Scheer is being acquired by SoftwareAG.  Focus of today’s talk is Enterprise BPM. 

Case Study: Business Process Transformation in the Banking Industry

Large brokerage, wealth management, private banking, investment management company.  Leading provider of global corporate and investment banking services.

This case is IT driven, Redemann speaks of building central repository prior to making technology decisions.  Enterprise Architecture process going from business processes to systems

EA in this case has four dimensions: Business Architecture, Information Architecture, Application Architecture, Technology Architecture.  Need to consider all dimensions to do effective enterprise BPM. 

Redemann emphasizes that EA understanding is required for BPM, but BPM framework is broader than the EA.

The underlying technology is ARIS, so all information (business strategy, process design, execution, management) is stored in the central ARIS Repository.

Business Process Transformation – Roadmap Steps: Strategy, Design, Implementation, Controlling (management)

Redemann has a lot of detailed slides on the business process transformation methodology, difficult to capture on the fly.  The slides will be available when the podcast is published.

The aspects analyzed in the method are: Products, Value Chains, Processes and Organizations.  Since the repository is centralized, all models created in analysis are available in implementation and controlling.  (In response to question on organization model to execution roles).

Processes are decomposed into Event-Driven Value Chain (EPC).  EPC describes the detailed sequence of the process activities.  Weak points are identified to definite root-cause and improvements.  The EPC includes capturing metrics, such as how long a step takes.  (which is not the same as what it should take)

Tons of information comes out of the analysis.  Contrasting the Appian talk, you can definitely see Clay’s keynote point about picking the right tool and method for the business problem at hand.  There isn’t one “tool” or “method”, but “one solution for a specific problem” (or set of problems).

Now, Redemann is showing us examples of the “as-is” versus “to-be” processes.  An interesting piece is the “what-if” financial projections of as-is to to-be.  This examples shows a 30% improvement (cost based) and was selected for implementation. 

Over the last year, IDS Scheer has focused on new capabilities for automating BPM governance.  BPM governance is process centric, so implementing BPM governance starts with process definition.  BPM Governance also includes performance management and monitoring.

In summary: Process Analysis to Process Improvement to Process Management

Redemann touches on some innovations from ARIS, including ARIS Express (free BPM software).  Suggests all of us Visio users replace our “painting tool” with a real BPM tool. 

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.