Ken Orr is the founder and chief scientist for The Ken Orr Institute, a business technology research organization. He is an internationally known and recognized expert on technology transfer, software engineering, information architecture, and data warehousing.
According to Orr, putting together EA, BPM, and SOA is essential for all enterprises today. Enterprise Architecture is critical to understanding the limits and condition of a business’s IT infrastructure. SOA is critical for designing 21st century systems, and improving business processes is necessary for all enterprises. Orr thinks that making SOA work is made much more difficult unless you deal with the business process first.
Business processes are not hard to conceive of, but they are very hard to manage in the real world and especially hard for big organizations. The trick is to create truly executable business models so that BP can be made to work. Business processes need to be integrated with the rest of the enterprise architectures. BP and SOA are not thin veneers over an organization’s existing IT, but are part of the infrastructure. Treating BP and SOA as a veneer ignores the data and the business rules of the organization.
Good models are important because they help people visualize new directions and procedures. If you can’t communicate the vision, people won’t get it. Models have to describe two concepts: the business processes, which is the understanding of what is needed from a business standpoint, and the Enterprise Architecture, which is understanding the organization’s IT as it exists now. Collaboration delivers the results. All the different architectures need to be integrated and mapped, and it is necessary to create good models that include all of them. Communication is the most important component of collaboration and change, and good models facilitate this. The model needs to show the merging of strategic planning, SOA, EA and the business processes. Orr cited Benson and Parker’s Square Wheel as a good model to use. EA is a model in itself, showing the business, content, application and technology architectures. The business models can be reused. Orr said that Zachman’s Framework, Porter’s Business Value Chain, and Rummler and Brache’s Enterprise Feedback Model are all good for this. He went into detail on the Zachman model. Microsoft uses a version of this model.
Porter’s Value Chain is good for showing the primary activities of a business and is also good for showing the actual chain that adds business value at each step of the process. The important things for every business are the inputs, outputs, and outcomes.
Orr asked the question, “Where do the high-level services come from?” In order to know, you have to have the enterprise architecture, and know the business processes, activity and workflow.
BP and SOA have two things in common. They are not intuitive and they run against the organizational bias. BP is the ultimate key to business improvement, quality, and for leveraging technology. SOA is the key technology for implementing components to do this. Workflow is the key technology for implementing SOA.
Orr quoted Rummler and Brache who said that, “Many managers do not understand their businesses.” They don’t understand in a detailed way, how their companies develop, make, and sell products. But the basics are fairly simple. There is a main process and there are inputs, outputs, and outcomes to this process. In order to clean and simplify what the organization does, it is necessary to get a good picture of the mainline process and how everything feeds into and out of it. Once the picture is complete, the organization can begin to clean it up. Orr said the common practice in business is to look up and down the hierarchy, (north and south) but that with BP and SOA in is necessary to look sideways at the process view, or as he puts it, “Search for the East Pole.”
Common mistakes include trying to automate the “as is” processes and nano-management, which ensures the big picture will not be seen.
The new generation of applications include:
- Process model driven architecture
- Service oriented architecture
- Data-centric, not document-centric architecture
- Flexible, adaptable, and agile applications
Orr predicts that BP will drive more and more initiatives and SOA will allow the purchasing and acquiring of tailored business processes and activities rather than software suites. The difficult part will be to tie the processes to SOA, workflow, and the data.
