Marwane El Kharbili

Mar 31, 2008

BPM & Agile Methods

Have you ever though about the nature of BPM projects from a software development point of view? Honestly I haven't. But Gartner people seem to have asked themselves questions about this. At least, they can put a name on it. Sandy kemsley affirms that most deleopment lifecycles used to design Business processes rely on the simple waterfall model.

The Gartner BPM Talk she reports about distinguishes between several development lifecycles, while putting focus on the "architected model-driven" one. This one caught my eye, since I also view BPM modelling as being adapted to model-driven approaches, especially since Process model transformations to BPEL (from EPCs or BPMN diagrams) have become a reality. Recent holistic approaches to BPM which consider the high-level strategic views and the low level workflow implementation layers as parts of a common biotope for BPM: of which I think that it makes sense and with which I agree, precisely because of the executable processes. Also, the "architected" in "architected model-driven", as far as I have understood it is also a necessity and a fact: as business processes span multiple vertical silos in the enterprise, they also rely on architectural, organizational and strategic resources for them to carry their added value. This is very easy to see in teh case of frameworks such as ARIS which is an enterprise modeling Framework and also contains views and models to represent the architectures involved in defining processes. Since the enterprise is architected, business processes which run through the enterprise should be architected accordingly, defining interfaces when necessary and splitting processes into layers and blocks.

But the thing about this talk, about which I read on Sandy Kemsley's Colmn2, is the question: what about using Agile development methods for BPM projects. The best point of the talk was the fact that due to the BPM lifecycle having iterations from the strategy phase to the controlling phase (I am referring here specifically to the ARIS Lifecycle, by IDS Scheer), but also including shorter iterations for aspects such as configuration, policies and rules modeling (which is always a keyword for me), agile methods would work much better than classical waterfall methodologies, which are used for most BPM projects. I am no expert in Agile development or RAD (rapid Application Development) though, but it still makes sense to me. I will keep an eye on any works, software or publications on that.

Marwane El Kharbili.

Mar 28, 2008

BPM Survey

Through Prof. Allweyer's Blog I discovered this website containing the results of a survey about BPM in Germany with 500 participants. There are four PDF files to be downloaded containing statistical figures and analysis. If you are interested in knowing about recent field study results, enjoy the read!

Mar 27, 2008

SOA Skills shortage, ok, but what is the solution?

This post by Loraine Lawson on ITBusinessedge makes quite a good discussion out of the recent agitation that resulted of a recent IBM survey saying that the main obstacle to starting SOA projects at Fortune 1000 companies is the string lack in SOA skills. I liked the sythesis she makes and she also tries to formulate answers to the problem. no more comments here, a read is worth it!

Marwane El Kharbili.

Mar 24, 2008

I am Brain Balanced!

What is he talking about?...(laughs), no I am not crazy and I do not take pills :D

I did one test more on tickle. Tickle is a great website where you can take all sorts of tests about all aspects of your personality. I often asked myself about where they get all those ideas from. well, they don't seem to have a problem with that. and the quality of the tests and the generated results are very good. They have a team of PhD psychologists who write the tests. Test vary, from your sports type, your perfect job, your IQ or your emotional IQ, to your brain type or your artist type. Tests are usually pretty long, from 5 to 12 pages, and it can take from 10 minutes to 20 minutes to complete one. But the results are worth it. Results contain a detailed analysis of the results of the test from a number of perspectives and even a list of scientific references, which at first really surprised me. Results are from 7 to 10 pages long, and they are written in really small characters. Tests are usually not free, but they regularly put tests online for members for free for a limited period of time. I never paid for any test. But I still did many on their site.

Now to the topic of this entry: in my case both halves of my brain work equally. This is the abstract of my result:

"That means you are able to draw on the strengths of both the right and left hemispheres of your brain, depending upon a given situation.

When you need to explain a complicated process to someone, or plan a detailed vacation, the left hemisphere of your brain, which is responsible for your ability to solve problems logically, might kick in. But if you were critiquing an art opening or coming up with an original way to file papers, the right side of your brain, which is responsible for noticing subtle details in things, might take over.

While many people have clearly dominant left- or right-brained tendencies, you are able to draw on skills from both hemispheres of your brain. This rare combination makes you a very creative and flexible thinker.

The down side to being balanced-brained is that you may sometimes feel paralyzed by indecision when the two hemispheres of your brain are competing to solve a problem in their own unique ways."

Oh, I forgot, you also have access to a community of users with which you can chat and exchange results of tests, or simply see them if you won't. I got to know some really special persons on tickle. So, do you think about getting on tickle?

Marwane El Kharbili.

Mar 21, 2008

Where the hell is Matt?

I discoverd this page almost 2 years ago, as I was in the middle of my master thesis. I fell in love with the video and the music, so I downloaded all videos in high definition and also the music for the soundtrack which is absolutely exquisite to th ears.

So I wanted to know how the videos were made and how Matt could actually travel everywhere around the world. I somehow felt profound sympathy for the guy! matt is a former scenarist for video games who someday gave up his job and gathered all hiss money to go around the world. he made videos with his famous dance and became very famous on the net, I guess even more that the numa numa dance by this guy on youtube. Simply because you never get enough of beautiful images from beautiful countries.

For his second trip, Mat got sponsored by a chewing-gum company, and made other wonderful videos. As fas as I read on his blog, he is now on this day still on another trip. I can't wait for the next videos!!! I promised myself to someday go the the same places, it's just that I'll need more time, like 400 years more, because I simply love my job! To help you wait, here are the three videos hosted on youtube:







Enjoy it and don't throw your job!

Marwane El Kharbili.

Mar 18, 2008

BPEL4PEOPLE and people

In his post, Fred Cummins criticizes the fact that BPEL4PEOPLE doesn't fulfill expectations of business users. Fred says that BPEL (see here for version 2.0 from OASIS) is not a language for business people but for programmers. Well, I personally don't know of any programmer who writes BPEL code himself. BPEL is a language for machines, for executions engines. BPEL is destined to be generated not written. On the other hand, BPEL4PEOPLE should allow including and defining human interaction. I don't personally know if that means that the BPEL4PEOPLE execution engine allows defining tasks that are realized by humans (Humanoid services so to say, if considering the general notion of a service) or if it means that it allows BPEL to be defined by people. I do however think the first explanation is the right one.

Nevertheless, in the second part of the post, Fred Cummins talks about possible repercussions of BPDM. The use of BPMN 1.1 (see here) and BPDM together would allow definition of choreography and orchestration for services, both of which are critical concepts in SOA.

I would conclude that there is a wave of opinions directly linking BPM to SOA, so Joe McKendrick, in "BPM and SOA Need Each Other." I must say that I do not think that SOA should be directly linked to BPM. This would simply restrict any flexibility BPM implementation has and its independence from technology, which provides the stability business people like and need so much. The whole story is all about ROI. If you don't want to take a bet on SOA, then why should you? In the end, it is your processes that create value, not your soa architecture. This however, does not exclude that we work on technologies allowing us using the current standards to build a bridge between business process management and an SOA implementation, just because both worlds go so well along with another.

Marwane El Kharbili.

Mar 13, 2008

SOA and semantic data integration

I found an interesting post about the role of semantic data integration in SOA by Ken Rugg. The author's main argument is that an efficient system governance implies an efficient SOA governance. And that this SOA governance can only be achieved if the data that is processed by an SOA architecture has the same meaning everywhere and for everybody. The way the author sees semantics is in the form of a Common Informational Model, not in the sense of reasoning-enabling ontologies. This reminded me of the CIM models by the DMTF, for IT system management, as part of their Web Based Enterprise Management (WBEM) activities. The efforts driven by the DMTF also seek to enable efficient distributed systems governance. Nothing exceptional up until now, apart from the fact that semantic data integration is not easy at all in highly dynamic systems, such as it would be the case once web service compositions will become a reality. No, the most interesting is Progress Data Xtend. Their approach to the question of enabling semantic data integration is using rules. However these rules must have access to all the data exchanges which from my point of view is not possible unless you use a service bus for managing and executing services, because it is a closed system, and controls all data exchanges running upon it. While many people think that SOA can only be implemented through a service bus, this is not true. SOA says nothing about its implementation, and SOA doesn't even tell you that you need web services. One can imagine open systems able to dynamically generate composition of their services, and a new choreography for all their services, once they have discovered a new service. Nevertheless, the idea would make sense if you use one single platform like JBPM from JBOSS to execute your services and are ready to integrate the Data Xtend platform to the rest of the SOA architecture. An interesting approach in all cases.

Marwane El Kharbili.

Mar 12, 2008

State of the BPM Market white paper

...from BEA. Well, this was a post on Column2, by Sandy Kemsley. She has worked on this white paper with BEA and it can be downloaded here. Of course you need to go through the whole BEA process, and even if you have an account (I used to download white papers from them that I never had enough time to read...) it should go smooth and easy. The content: strategic positioning of BPM, the situation of the vendor market and trends in the domain. I have not had time to read it but I certainly will, sometime soon. Oh and this other post again by Sandy Kemsley makes a summary of the talk held by BEA (Jay Simons) about the results from their BPM Market state survey.

Marwane El Kharbili.

Mar 11, 2008

Gartner BPM and Process Design Patterns

In this post by Sandy kemsley, where she reports about the Gartner BPM summit I have found some interesting ideas upon which I would like to react. She speaks about the talk by Janelle Hil at Gartner's BPM summit, where Janelle Hill reminds why BPM is different from workflow and business process reengineering techniques that existed before. She also discusses when the use of a BPMS becomes necessary. What I found most intriguing is that she speaks about policies on the level of BPMS (I guess she means generally also modelling and analysis frameworks) , and I am convinced of the necessity of managing policies at the same level of managing process, organizational, and system information. Policies can also influence the business by making it do what is expected from it, having influence on its quality, performance or security among others. So policies represent an asset for the enterprise in the same way processes do.

Another interesting thing to note is that Gartner just changed their definition of BPMS so the new quadrant looks different. the final and most interestingthing in the post to me was discussin process design patterns. Sandy kemsley says that the approach she uses with clients is trying to identify what kinds of process patterns they have in order to decide for the best BPMS for them. "three most common patterns that they see with BPMS are case management, form-driven workflow, and participant-driven workflow". Janelle Hill has listed 6 of them, which I would be curious to know.

Marwane El Kharbili.

Mar 10, 2008

What is the difference between SOA, EA, BPM, Enterprise 2.0...?!

Such questions may be asked to you if you work in these fields and are often speaking to people about "revolutionary" technologies. Whether you are evangelizing SOA, selling BPM, conducting EA inventory projects or communicating on Enterprise 2.0 internally, you have surely encoutered many lost eyes looking to locate themselves in this armada of new buzz-words. And not being at ease whan trying to answer the question: "What is the difference between X and Y" may not be a very good sign to give to your client/collaborators.

This post by Joe McKendrick emphasizes this and reminds us of the actual goal all these technologies are longing for: make processes more efficient, shorten time to market, increase ROI on IT, etc... Everything that would allow your client to achieve their business goals following their selected strategy. One thing Joe notes aside is the obvious misunderstanding of what BPM is (well he relevates that many people are confusing BPM and SOA and seeing them as being to 90% the same thing) by confusing it with SOA. this is something I can confirm through my experience and what I hear and read in the community about BPM. vendors, consulting companies and consultants sell BPM as being the technology, not the business discipline. This of course applies if you have a workflow engine that you sell as a BPM engine, but you ain't doing no BPM really. I won't diverge in a troll about BPM Vs. BPM (for the moment :D).

Enjoy the post by Joe McKendrick.

Marwane El Kharbili

Mar 9, 2008

New Google R&D center in zürich

I have had a look at the new facilities of Google's new R&D center in Zurich. It is the eight R&D center of Google in the EMEA zone and quite frankly looks tremendous! I have looked at 31 shots of the new acilities and really is astonishing what a company like google can do to get the most out of their zooglers (Google engineers). I won't even say anything about all that you can find there. The least I can say, is that if one works there, I'm pretty sure one would do a hell of a lot of additional hours... :D

Mar 8, 2008

Hala Gorani, Snow and Syria

Do you know Hala gorani? She is one of CNN's top journalists, always travellig around the world, making shock documentations, doing the news, and quite honestly I know she looks like a swede but is an arab (both her parents are Syrian, her name is a classical arabic name meaning "halo"), I still don't know where she lives. I got to know of Hala Gorani for the first time during the Israel-Hezbollah war in 2006. She covered it the whole summer.

Among other things, Hala Gorani has a program on CNN called inside the middle east.
This time, Hala Gorani was reporting on record snow falls in syria with meters of snow piled and a completely white city. This reminded me of the record snow falls in morocco two winters ago, where mountain roads were even closed for days.Well, this high-edge CNN journalist was taken as a target by passants with huge snow balls. During the outtakes at the end of the program, we could see that it took her quite some tries to get the introduction of one of the reports on film, because she was each time interrupted with snow balls arriving at light speed on her. The least I could say is that she got humour and she kept laughing at her spectators, eventually pursuing them herself. That was a very funny thing to see I can tell you :D

Marwane El Kharbili

Mar 7, 2008

After Mentos and Coke now... Pork and Coke

I've been hearing about a lot of videos on the net showing what comes out of pork meat when coked is poured on it...I couldn't believe the title when I saw that video....It is utterly disgusting. Of course the video itself in so proof, but I'm sure ain't testing it just to see those maggots coming out. Watch the video and tell me what you think...



...ewwwww...
Marwane El Kharbili

Mar 5, 2008

Trends in Biz Apps by Yvonne Genovese

A shortie again. On this post on sandy Kemsley's blog, she noted some very interesting reported notes on the talk by Yvonne Genovese on the morning's technology keynote at Gartner's BPM summit 2008. Yvonne Genovese listed 9 big trends in business applications from her point of view. Most remarquable, numbers 1, 2 and 3 (logically), here the citation:
  1. "Applications shift from pre-canned logic to dynamic assemblies, something that we’re already seeing with large packaged applications (such as SAP) opening up their internal functionality as services, allowing those functions to be consumed — along with any number of other web services — as part of a composite application or business process.
  2. Convergence of business processes, people and information: applications that provide business value will consider all of these.
  3. Focus on performance management evolution from reporting and monitoring to predictive planning and closed-loop optimization."
My pick is number 6 (citation):
  1. The role of the ERP suite will change, since they typically provide a low degree of innovation; they will tend to be services consumed by other more agile applications.
Which to me is in strong correlation with point number 1. Read the post it's short and informative.

Marwane El Kharbili

Mar 4, 2008

Doing Business Internationally: How to act in each country

I was reading one very interesting article on Journal du Net about the different customs in countries around the world, till I stumbled upon two countries that were very interesting to me: Germany and Morocco. For those of you who don't know it, I'm Moroccan, I have traveled a bit around the world for my studies and I am currently working in Germany. All right so let's get to the point here and read what about Germans:
  • Germans are rigorous, and this makes them very appreciated in the business world. meetings always start on time, being late is very negative. Meetings also always end up on time. The use of titles such as Dr. and Prof. is very important and one should know with whom one speaks, in order to avoid looking very impolite.
Well. I can speak as I see this from an outsider's perspective, the description given by the french is really not far at all from truth, and it takes some time to get used to all this. But overall, such properties make the Germans the people I like to work with most, because of their seriousness and their rigor, even though they don't always understand my jokes :D

Now what about the Moroccans:
  • Don't be surprised if moroccans get very tactile and show much familiarity towards your person, moroccans don't like barriers and calling you by your surname, using the second person of the singular ("Tu" in French and "Du" in German, it doesn't exist in English), and even kissing you is totally normal and is a sign of their appreciation. they will often invite over at home to have meal or dinner, this is where you can discover all the richness of Moroccan culture and hospitality. And this is where some well chosen compliments won't do your business no harm at all...
I can only agree 100%. This is well hit. I'm sorry to tell you that due to my "internatiolaization" and heavy work on my person after living so long in Europe in different countries...I don't kiss people :D

If you want to read the whole story, and see what is important in other countries, go here: http://www.journaldunet.com/management/dossiers/0708201-coutumes-etranger/. Ahemm...It's in French...

Marwane El Kharbili

Mar 2, 2008

Get your PhD Blog on the web!

I have just registered for an account on PhDWeblogs.net. As the name says it, this website acts as a registry of all PhD blogs there is on the web, at least those that registered. You can scroll blogs by topic. Currently there are 500 of them. I will report on it if I get to get any special advantages from being on the site. For the moment the only things I learned is that Marlene Charlotte Larsen from Aalborg University in Denmark found out that 31% of all danish internet users between the age of 12 and 18 spend 2 hours or more per day on the internet... :D

Marwane El Kharbili

Mar 1, 2008

OMG Information days

The OMG Information days are going to be organized in three venues in three consecutive days.
Title this time is "Enterprise SOA - Planung and Management". The event's language is German.
Check out the website of the events here. In Frankfurt, Düsseldorf and Stuttgart, experts are going to tell about their professional experience in topics such as SOA's Business Case, SOA-based IT modernisation strategies, SOA's development lifecycles and SOA governance.

Marwane El Kharbili