BPM / SOA Community Insights

BEI Optimization for Innovation Conference – Open Call for Participation

Our parent organization, the Business Ecology Initiative (BEI), is hosting an exciting new Optimization for Innovation Conference program.  The inaugural conference, December 6 – 8, 2010, in Santa Clara, CA USA, is “Optimization for Innovation: Reset; Joint Business & Technology Actions for the New Normal”:

As the world economy emerges from a painful recession, organizations are confronted with the challenge of retaining bottom-line diligence, while pursuing market sustaining and gaining innovation, in an environment riddled with uncertainty, increased regulation, consumer reluctance and tighter credit. This is the “new normal.” To execute in the “new normal,” organizations are seeking new ideas and techniques to optimize business operations and foster business innovation.

At the inaugural Optimization for Innovation conference, executives, senior-level practitioners, experts and thought leaders will share real-world experiences and pragmatic 90-day action items to harvest savings and trapped value from existing processes, resources and capabilities.

There is an open call for participation that members and friends of the BPM/SOA Community should consider.  We are seeking proposals for the following program and tutorial topics:

Program Topics

• Optimization for Innovation Success Stories
• Business-Technology Reset: Optimization for Innovation
• Governance Models for the New Normal
• Business Analytics as Optimization Foundation
• New Normal Linchpins: Business-Tech Savvy Professionals
• Business-IT Alignment is a Dead-End
• Business Optimization Techniques

Tutorials Topics

• Instituting a Business Performance Measurement Framework
• Cyber Risk Analysis: Assessment, Policy, & Economics
• Business Process Modeling and Business Instrumentation
• Lean / Six Sigma in the New Normal

Presentations and tutorials proposed should be geared toward an audience comprising direct reports and senior staff of the COO, CFO and CIO. All presentations and tutorials must include a 90-day action plan for attendees to pursue post-conference.

The submission deadline is Friday, August 13, 2010. Please note, submissions that are direct pitches for product or services will not be considered. Submissions should be prepared in English, containing the following information:

• Presenter name, title and affiliation
• Presenter Bio
• Session Title
• 2 - 3 paragraph description of proposed session
• 3 - 5 bullets on what attendees will learn
• Target audience characteristics: role, skill and industry
• 90-day action plan items

Submit abstracts as described above to Program Chair Brenda M. Michelson via e-mail.

New BEI Podcast: Faisal Hoque on the Power of Business-IT Convergence

Faisal Hoque, Founder and Chief Executive Officer, BTM Corporation, spoke on The Power of Convergence: Why Bringing Business and Technology Together Matters, at the March 2010 Business Ecology Initiative Symposium in Jacksonville FL.   

Hoque set the stage with the startling fact that only 74 of the original 500 firms remain in the S&P index just 40 years later.  The frenetic pace of business has reduced the enterprise life expectancy.  The response has been a call for agility.  Referencing research of the BTM Institute, Hoque stated that agility is achieved through repeatable management processes.

The components of agility are flexible organizational constructs and behaviors, standards for enterprise architecture, including business architecture, a portfolio investment approach that is structured to balance between stability and agility, and a governance model that facilitates horizontal and collaborative decision making processes.

Of the flexible organizational constructs and behaviors, Hoque focused on business-technology convergence.  Unlike business-IT alignment, which is essentially communicating silos, business-technology convergence features intertwined business and technology activities, dedicated to driving superior financial performance.

With the agility and business-technology convergence context set, Hoque walked through the BTM management practice framework, including the 17 capabilities required to achieve convergence. 

In addition to discussing the practices, Hoque shared metrics and trends from the hundreds of organizations who have utilized the BTM measurement tools over the past 7 years.  A critical finding is a correlation of management practice maturity and corporate growth and financial returns – stock price, earnings and margins.

Click here to listen to an audio recording of Hoque’s presentation and view the slides.

 

[Cross-posted from our parent blog, the Business Ecology Initiative.]

Have you visited the Business Ecology Initiative blog?

As you might know, the BPM / SOA Consortium is a practice area community under the Business Ecology 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.

Recently, we launched a BEI blog to highlight opportunities, challenges, successes, techniques, technologies, teams and outcomes related to Business Ecology. Similar to this blog, our goals are to share real-world insights with practitioners, engage in community conversation, and facilitate all important peer connections.

Checkout our initial posts:

Business Ecology: Optimization for Innovation

Forrester: Don’t be an IT-hater, be a Business-IT Integrator

Counterintuitive: Creative Agency + ISO 9000 = Creativity Increase

Suggest discussion topics.  Chat with us on Twitter.  Join us in carving the path to business-IT integration.

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.