Articles

Business Architecture 2008: Standards, Frameworks and Governance

Author(s):

William Ulrich

President, TSG, Inc.

Business architecture is poised to make significant inroads this year. While business architecture emerged as a distinct area of focus in 2006 and matured during 2007, it is poised for a big year in 2008. A number of factors are beginning to converge that will make 2008 a turning point for this essential discipline including a new focus on standards, convergence of frameworks and solidification of the role of business architecture in enterprise governance.

Strategic Decisions

Author(s):

Larry Goldberg

Managing Partner, Knowledge Partners International LLP

In these pages over the last year we have focused on the business value of separating Business Rules from Business Process, and using Business Decisions as both organizing principal for those Business Rules, and as a means of managing the rules. The value of the Business Decision Management (BDM) approach is multifold, as the Business Decision is the natural means of connecting Business Rules to Business Process in a BPM environment.

BPMS Watch: New Hope for BPMN Portability

Author(s):

BPMInstitute.org

Business Relationship Manager - Product Lifecycle Management, Chevron Corporation

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

Author(s):

BPMInstitute.org

Business Relationship Manager - Product Lifecycle Management, Chevron Corporation

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

Author(s):

BPMInstitute.org

Business Relationship Manager - Product Lifecycle Management, Chevron Corporation

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.

Realizing the Strategic Promise of SOA Requires SOA Governance

Author(s):

Tom Dwyer

Editorial Director and current Faculty Member, BPMInstitute.org

Recent tactical success in the utilization of Web services has brought renewed attention to the timing for a strategic commitment to Service Oriented Architectures (SOA). Early adopters have been investing in SOA for the past five years but now the development of more rigorous methodologies and technologies, and the maturing of standards, are making SOA accessible to everyone.

BPM – A Cure for Institutional Memory Loss

Author(s):

Ken Mullins

Senior Principal, MITRE Corporation

Across the federal government, large numbers of baby boomers are reaching the age of retirement. In 2006, more than 60,000 people left the civil service. The federal Office of Personnel Management believes that 2009 will be the peak year for boomer retirements. What can federal agencies do now, to stop this massive loss of institutional knowledge?

Stepped-up recruiting and staffing efforts will help a little, as will additional emphasis on outsourcing.

The Grail: Strategic Process Work

Author(s):

BPMInstitute.org

Business Relationship Manager - Product Lifecycle Management, Chevron Corporation

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

Author(s):

BPMInstitute.org

Business Relationship Manager - Product Lifecycle Management, Chevron Corporation

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.

Achieving Business Agility

Author(s):

Tom DeBevoise

Co-Author of The Microguide to Process Modeling in BPMN 2.0, www.tomdebevoise.com

Often, competitive environments change faster than a firm’s responding processes and decision making abilities. Most organizations fail at executing strategies designed to improve their position in the market.