Business architecture is, as my co-chair Ken Orr has said, the “missing link” in the architecture puzzle. While our first architecture conference this past spring focused on Enterprise Architecture, we found a groundswell of support from our attendees and analysts for drilling into the specifics of Business Architecture.
Build your SOA: Process and Methodology, Part I
Introduction
SOA projects tend to be large initiatives with a lot of risk and potential reward associated with them. The Return on Investment (ROI) on a SOA project is sometimes very hard to quantify (and thus hard to sell), which brings about the need for a solid process and methodology to ensure the success of an SOA project.
A SOA is a set of tools, technologies, frameworks, and best practices that enable the quick and easy implementation of services.
Key Components of SOA
I’m excited to be joining the team of contributors to the SOA Institute. In my first article, I’ll provide my definition of SOA and describe what I think are the key components of an SOA. You will see that I take an enterprise view of SOA.
The Compliance Journey – Balancing Risk and Controls with Business Improvement
Vince Sumpter has over 20 years of experience in Performance Management, data warehousing, and related areas and sees a synergy between process management, performance management, and controls transformation. The new regulatory environment demands compliance, but most of the present efforts are manual and specific only to the rules with little regard to how the changes could improve the business. Sumpter sees process, performance, and controls all coming together to give new value to the enterprise.
Sumpter says there is a lot of buzz now about Sarbanes Oxley (S-O).
BPMS Watch: Standardizing Management of Process Performance
I recently attended an event where experienced BPM vendors, analysts, academics, and user organizations came to discuss what needs to come next in terms of technical standards, software capabilities, and overall business value from business process technology. The event was hosted by OMG, the standards organization behind the Business Process Modeling Notation standard used for process modeling and, increasingly, for business-driven process design.
Doing Business Architecture
It is hard for your organization to have an agile organization these days if your IT systems and infrastructure aren’t. Enterprise Architecture and specifically Business Architecture is aimed at helping organizations become truly agile.
A couple of years ago I wrote an article entitled “The 3 faces of Enterprise Architecture”.
BPM is Art as Well as Science
The release of the Academy Award nominations last January might seem to have little to do with business process management. But it does. In many ways, movies are the quintessential process industry.
Changing Perceptions – How EII Missed the Boat on SOA
In the technology world, there is a lot to be said about perception, and how perception defines your reality. You can perceive a market one way, only to change your point of view slightly and realize that the real target market for a class of technologies is quite different from where those technologies are actually being sold. Unfortunately, that change of perception often occurs too late to make a difference. A perfect example of this phenomenon is Enterprise Information Integration, or EII. EII is a specific segment of the data integration market that was gaining some re
Is RETE Necessary for Business Rules – Why you should care
Many BRMS vendors, especially the leaders Fair Isaac and ILOG, consider their implementation of the RETE algorithm a critical part of their product offering. Yet you might not understand what RETE is and why it can be either useful or unnecessary, depending on the rules problem domain. So what is RETE?
The RETE algorithm was developed to improve evaluation performance with large knowledge or fact sets. For example, a diagnostic expert system might describe many signs and symptoms for the diagnosis of a condition. Because of the diagnosis, an action may be taken.
Analysis: Isn’t that for smart people?
“Analysis is the difficult part of a business improvement project”. “Analysts are really smart people that are hyper intelligent” and “analysis can not be trained”. Those are some of the preconceptions project teams have to fear the analysis work that needs to be done on a process improvement project.
None of these are true. First of all many people confuse analysis with all those complex statistical tools that, for example, six sigma makes you believe you should apply.