What is business architecture? If you ask ten business architects, you’re likely to get ten overlapping definitions clustered, to varying degrees, somewhere around the correct answer. But what is that answer?
BPMInstitute.org
Articles by: BPMInstitute.org
SOA Watch: Don’t Let the Vendors Drive Your SOA
So, why are organizations looking towards their “comfort vendors” and “comfort technologies?” It’s a matter of path of least resistance and lack of education.
Path of least resistance because the relationship is already established, and you don’t have to go through the hassle of getting to know new players, or many new players.
BPMS Watch: Ten Tips for Effective Process Modeling
The BPMN specification presents lots of technical definitions and rules, but it does not teach you how to create process models that are effective in their primary mission – maximizing shared understanding of the as-is or to-be process. To do process modeling effectively, you need to go beyond the spec and learn a basic methodology, best practices, and specific diagram patterns to use in common situations. To illustrate the point, here are ten tips for effective modeling in BPMN.
ERP, Old IT and the Rise of Something New
Complex and proprietary ERP systems symbolize the final evolution of “Old IT”. They are the embodiment of a frame of mind that is inherent in the culture of the industrial economy and its great invention – the assembly line. That mindset attempts to organize every activity down to the lowest levels of detail. It makes rules and regulations for everything and then tries to run each activity over and over, faster and faster without changing anything. This is how you get greater and greater productivity at lower and lower costs; this is what we call efficiency.
BPMS Watch: New Hope for BPMN Portability
I have long railed against OMG’s inexcusable omission of even minimal support for model portability in the BPMN standard. In the forever-stuck-in-final-edit version 1.1, they still haven’t even provided an XML storage format, or serialization, for BPMN, much less a list of the elements and attributes that any “compliant” tool must support. Yet in my BPMN training, students simply assume such portability exists.
SOA Watch: How Mashups fit with SOA
With the advent of rich internet applications and extensible interfaces such as AJAX, we now have the ability to quickly create mashups to solve specific business problems using standard dynamic interfaces that front services. Mashups provide powerful ways to take existing applications and services, and create something even more useful for business.
We could say that the lines between the enterprise and the Web are blurring…first blurred at the content or information levels with the early mashups, and now at the service and process levels as well.
You Should Plan to Fail
Service Oriented Architecture is one thing; creating a high-scale – and resilient – SOA is something else altogether. Let’s examine several approaches to high-scale SOA computing.
The Grail: Strategic Process Work
The notion of process is of utmost value to organizations, but the reality has often fallen short. The power of process is potentially far more powerful than today’s fragmented practices. With the right approach, however, process can have even more impact on organizational results than it did in the eighties and nineties. More specifically, process is the key to designing and operating organizations to deliver unique, sustained value.
So what is happening today?
BPMS Watch: Roundtripping Revisited
In the early days of BPM – four or five years ago – everyone thought BPEL was the BPM standard, at least for runtime execution. Not long after, the importance of business-friendly process modeling came to the fore, and BPMN emerged as the standard for that. The mismatch between graph-oriented BPMN models, where you can route the flow just about anywhere, and block-oriented BPEL, where you can’t, didn’t seem to worry BPM vendors. After all, a model was just a model, a business requirements document in diagrammatic form.
Innovation Pioneer of the Year: You!
Erik Weihenmayer is an acrobatic skydiver, long distance biker, marathon runner, skier, mountaineer, ice climber, and rock climber. Erik graduated from Weston High School in Connecticut in 1987. As the school’s wrestling captain, he represented the state in National Freestyle Wrestling Championships. In 1991, he graduated from Boston College, and in the same year, he trekked in the Pamir Mountains of Tajikistan.
