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Implementing SOA: Total Architecture in Practice
If you are an architect responsible for a service-oriented architecture (SOA) in an enterprise, you face many challenges. Whether intended or not, the architecture you create defines the structure of your enterprise at many different levels, from business processes down to data storage. It defines the boundaries between organizational units as well as between business systems. Your architecture must go beyond defining services and provide practical solutions for a host of complex distributed system design problems, from orchestrating business processes to ensuring business continuity. Implementing your architecture will involve many projects over an extended period, and your guidance will be required.
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Enterprise BPM
The purpose of this article is to give some insights on what business process modeling means at enterprise level. Despite the fact that many initiatives start with a project based approach in a very limited part of the business, the investment is much lower and the success rate is higher when you start a top down approach. This article will provide a definition of enterprise business process modeling, and its main building blocks.
Research Brief: BPM and Insurance
This Research Brief highlights a selection of the findings from BPMInstitute.org’s State of BPMSM survey. It discusses the continual challenges insurance companies face in a very competitive environment such as attracting new customers, rapidly delivering quotes, selling additional services to customers, managing underwriting risk and meeting regulatory requirements. Since business process management (BPM) is the practice of improving the efficiency and effectiveness of any organization by automating and optimizing the organization’s business processes, it is a key technology component of IT initiatives to produce a more responsive insurance company.
Believable ROI for SOA
The SOA bandwagon has been trundling on for about ten years now and, if you believe Gartner (and why not?) SOA has passed the Peak of Inflated Expectations, dived to the Trough of Disillusionment, and is currently climbing the Slope of Enlightenment, on its way to the Plateau of Productivity. Industry estimates are that the journey for most companies is at least another 3 – 5 years. There are a small number of published success stories for SOA, and I am sure a large of unpublished horror stories.
Lincoln Trust: Our Evolution from Document Workflow to BPM
A few years ago, Lincoln Trust Company (formerly Fiserv Investment Support Services) was faced with a familiar document management problem – their manual process for handling financial documents could not keep up with over 100,000 documents coming in each month, resulting in growing backlogs, long processing times, and the inability to find documents when needed.
Starting the Journey towards Process Based Management
At each BrainStorm BPM Conference, there is constant discussion around how organizations can improve their processes and move to a process focus. This is not new. A focus on the process dimension of work and process-centered improvement approaches has been on most organization’s radar screens since the 1993 release of Reengineering the Corporation by Michael Hammer and James Champy.
BPMS Watch: IBM Takes BPA to the Cloud
“Cool” is not a word I would normally apply to IBM’s BPM software, but for the new BPM BlueWorks offering announced at Impact this week, the term is appropriate. IBM bills BPM BlueWorks as a BPM community in the cloud, and it is that, plus a lot more. Actually, I think its greatest immediate impact could be to transform the market for business process analysis (BPA) tools.
Don’t Panic, It May be Simpler than you Think! Business Processes and Business Rules need not be Complex
Introduction:
Is SOA Governance a Confused Mess or Competitive Weapon?
The concern about SOA governance has ratcheted up as enterprises are aggressively looking for ways to get more value out of their existing services and resources (which is a perennial promise of IT solutions). In perusing the increasing commentary on the topic, it seems to me that SOA governance – what it is, its goals, its success requirements, its solution requirements, etc – is highly dependent on the perspective of the people involved.
The Business Architecture Ecosystem & Metamodel
Business architecture ties together a diverse ecosystem that represents your enterprise from a wide variety of perspectives. These include strategies, tactics and goals; business units; semantics and rules; capabilities, value chains and processes; projects and initiatives; and customers and suppliers. These business “artifacts”, along with the relationships among these artifacts, are the essence of business architecture. The complexity of most organizations is such that the business ecosystem cannot be readily visualized by the individuals managing and working within that ecosystem. By representing business artifacts in the business architecture metamodel, the ability to visualize complex business ecosystems becomes a reality.
Learn How the US Treasury Manages Consumer Complaints Using BPM
This webinar showcases how government agencies are using Business Process Management (BPM) to overcome the challenges of a shrinking economy, while still delivering, and improving, services.
In response to a heightened sense of citizen engagement, government agencies are striving to deliver improved transparency in addition to quality services. At the same time, shrinking budgets demand that agencies do more with less.
Do you know your BPMS Usage Patterns?
BPM is one of the key drivers for the success of your business. Business Process Management Systems (BPMS) provide you with tools and technology to deliver the values of BPM. Effective enterprise deployment of BPMS requires an understanding of different usage patterns. An enterprise class BPMS must support these usage patterns, in addition to being scalable and highly reliable.It is important to understand these usage patterns and make sure that your enterprise BPMS meets all of them.
Improving Business Performance
Performance, whether on a stage of theatre or business, is all about “making it happen”. Whether a Shakespearean tragedy or strategic business initiative, the performance of the organizational unit is what produces results. The math is simple: One, someone writes the play (strategic plan). Two, everyone in the group rehearses their parts (departmental and individual performance plans). And three, the troupe orchestrates individual performances into a unified group performance (execution of tactical plans providing goods and services to customers).
BPMS Watch – Five Things They Left Out of BPMN 2.0
Last month I gave you five things to love about BPMN 2.0. This time it’s five they left out. As a member of the development team, I understand why they were left out. And as a BPMN educator and author looking to add value on top of the standard rather than just to summarize the spec, I’m glad they gave me room to do that.
Strategies for developing a Roadmap for your SOA initiative
There has been a lot of chatter lately about SOA failures, the “Death of SOA”, and Big SOA vs Little SOA. Many IT departments have been struggling to deliver the ROI that they promised their executive team when they raised the capital to start their SOA initiatives. There are two major reasons for these lack of desired results. First and foremost, is a lack of focus on architecture. Second is a lack of a well defined roadmap. Many, including myself, have written articles about the lack of focus on architecture. In this article I will provide a strategy for putting together a roadmap.
Is Your Change Management Program Impacted by Change Saturation?
Is Your Change Management Program Impacted by Change Saturation? Your Change Management program is in place and communications are going out regularly, but you find your associates disengaged, confused and very skeptical of the upcoming change. You talk regularly with your team and other associates, but you feel like you’re dealing with a disproportionate emotional reaction to each change-related communication that goes out. Do these situations sound familiar? If your Change Management initiative contains all the key components for success and you have been diligent with its implementation but still find the people within the organization unresponsive, you could be dealing with change saturation.
Business Process Management and Cloud Computing
Cloud Computing is changing the fundamental way in which information technology services are being delivered. It is also spawning a whole new series of terms and acronyms like Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), Business Operations Platform (BOP), Public Cloud and Private Cloud. It seems as though new terms are being coined every day. As both established and emerging vendors move into the Cloud Computing marketplace the definition of Cloud Computing continues to morph.
Rocks in the stream: Applying Lean to IT, HR and Accounting
Finding the Customer
Customer focus is a critical element in lean thinking. Do you set the pace of production to the customer demand rate (the Takt time)? Is the Voice of the Customer (VOC) used in product and service design? The answer is always an emphatic “Yes”. The customer is always critical to improvement activities.
The Business Architecture, Value Streams and Value Chains
Many companies are considering a Business Architecture (BA) initiative as part of their corporate strategy. While researching and analyzing the BA, they are rediscovering Michael Porter’s value chain. Many find this reawakening quite logical, while some may get confused between the terms; value chains and value streams. This article will provide an explanation and synthesis of these remarkable and enlightening concepts. First, I will clarify and define the basic terms so that I can explain their architectural relationships.
The Rule Driven Center of Excellence: Improving Requirements Engineering at the Internal Revenue Service
The Guidance and Outreach Office of the Business Rules and Requirements Management Division of the Internal Revenue Service contributed to and reviewed this article.
