Whether they realize it or not, the only thing Enterprises do is run Business Processes (BP). However, how effectively and efficiently they do this depends on the state of an Enterprises’ Architecture and the state of mind of the companies’ leaders.
Most Enterprises still have their processes formulated by Business Analysts (BA) as textual requirements. Then these requirements go to the IT side, where digital simulations of them are designed. These simulations are supposed to behave as the original processes were intended to. However, despite all the OOD techniques, they rarely do. This is what creates the infamous ‘gap’ between Business and IT.
BPM provides BAs with the ability to model the processes and System Designers (SD) with the ability to run what the BAs had modeled with almost no alterations. There is no gap between BAs and SDs in this method. It seems like a clear, simple, and proven concept to accept and implement for both sides, as it benefits both sides with increased business agility and decreased time-to market. Nevertheless, I have heard more than once, from IT management especially, that “this organization is not ready for BPM”.
It looks like they are not ready for BPM exactly like they were and are not ready for other new methodologies (e.g. ESB) and the products based on them (BPMS, SAP Netweaver, Oracle Fusion). Statistically, only 23% of SAP customers have upgraded to Netweaver, and the majority of the current Oracle/former Siebel, Peoplesoft, and JD Edwards customers have forced Oracle to prolong support for these obsolete products until 2013, to avoid upgrading to Oracle Fusion.
So, we have on the one hand the Business Departments (BD), which feel unsatisfied by IT cost and services and have all the money; and on other hand big software vendors (SAP, Oracle, IBM, Microsoft) which feel very upset after their new products have been effectively rejected by IT. What both sides are trying to do about this was made clear, for example, in a ‘CIO Magazine’ report: “…An IBM executive says his company will begin to sell … software to [business] workers – bypassing the IT department… [It will] make business managers – not the IT department – the arbiter of all things digital…[It] gives enterprises computing muscles without the need for a massive internal IT organization…”, which may ‘lead to the end of the enterprise IT as we know it.’ 1
The real owners of business processes are business departments. If (or, rather when) BPMS becomes available as SAAS, it will take little training for business analysts to create basic process diagrams and then to provide them to external BPMS specialists to run. It is not easy, and it will not happen tomorrow, but it will happen sooner rather than later, especially if IT remains ‘not ready’.
Is this a death sentence for IT? Yes, for those who have lost the ability to transform themselves and their organizations; no for those who are still able to change. The ‘readiness’, of course, cannot come overnight. An Enterprise can and should create a Transformation Roadmap – a plan that enables it to gradually move from its current, ‘Legacy’ architectural state to a future ‘Desired’ one.
It sounds like Enterprise Architecture (EA) doesn’t it? Yes, and rightly so. The complexity problems of modern Enterprise IT are architectural in nature. However, we are not talking about good old-fashioned ‘nice-to-have’ EA that is more descriptive or bureaucratic than practical and efficient. Instead, we are talking about modern Enterprise Architecture Transformation Framework, which should be a ‘must’, multi-year, day-by-day, month-by-month Business Transformation effort knowingly and willingly accepted by every stakeholder team. Yes, this is easier said than done. In a real Enterprise, with all its political tensions and power games it is almost impossible to have something willingly accepted and followed by everyone. It is only possible if this ‘something’ is absolutely objective, scientifically proven, and able to bring real benefits not only to the whole enterprise but to every individual contributor as well; the other condition is having open-minded IT personnel who are responsive to an objective, logical reasoning.
Here is our reasoning:
- Computer Science (CS) is the underlying scientific basis for the existence and development of IT;
- The development of IT as an industry has been a history of constantly growing complexity being met with new and improved approaches, methods, and solutions offered by CS.
- Whenever complexity began outgrowing the methods that CS proposed at the time, CS offered new, higher concepts and methods, which IT accepted and applied to regain its efficiency; the last time this happened was when IT entered the Design phase, and new concepts like meta-code (models), meta-data (schemas), and meta-hosts (networks) were offered along with new approaches like Object Orientation, and new frameworks like UML and RUP.
- At the brink of the millennium IT’s complexity had reached the maximum level that the Design approach could accommodate. Computer Science responded with new architectural concepts – Business Processes, Services, Enterprise Service Bus, etc. The approaches based on these concepts – BPM and SOA – offered the way to untangle the ‘spaghetti’ architectures that threaten to suffocate Enterprise via the infamous ‘ripple effect’.
- BPM and SOA, properly implemented, have been proven to enable IT to resolve its current major problems:
o High TCO;
o Low business agility;
o High cost of exit from legacy technologies.
Thus, BPM/ESB/SOA – based Architectural framework is an objective, scientific answer to the challenges of IT’s Architectural phase. It may be ignored, but it cannot not be disproved. IT has a choice on its road right now: to stop dealing with Architecture phase by Design methods and start the transformation immediately, or to continue on the current way of ignoring methodological innovation and face what Nicholas G. Carr called “an inexorable shift from being an asset that companies own to being a service that they purchase from utility providers.”
