Agile BPM

I found this post in a Dialog blog. Dialog conference series are organized by ILOG, of course tackle everything around Business Rule Management Systems. The post is about making BPM agile. The answer is: BPM, BRMS, SOA, Events Management. How? Well, Daryl Plummer, Vice President and Chief Gartner Fellow gave a talk about just that at Dialog08. I found the following points very interesting. A more dynamic BPM will have an effect on the following points:

• Business agility
• Decision making
• Revenue opportunities
• Customer satisfaction
• Regulatory compliance

I find the second and last extremely interesting since hey form the core of my work at the IDS and my topic of research. It is true that managing decision making independently from where it is used, but also being able to modify and deploy it into business processes where the business is realized brings agility to the enterprise. Regulatory compliance is also a bog concern at companies currently, and even late adopters are now starting to explore ways of achieving that because they have to comply to laws and regulations in order to avoid judiciary pursuits or trials.
A second interesting though was that SOA is IT driven and BPM business-led. It is not about aligning IT to business, it is about integrating both, make sure they work together. So there is a need for a process-centric layer between both. This is what tools like ARIS are all about. Providing a comprehensive framework for managing business processes, while helping the implementation of these business processes.

The third idea was about events and services. Apart from the fact that consuming services is the natural way humans handle things. Nobody is interested in how a service is realized. A service is just the abstract interface to an value-adding functionality. Now the things is that services are made to be executed upon occuring events. Events and services just fit well. A services architecture integrated with an event management framework is another component in achieving flexibility. I have usually always heard of CEPs, Complex Event Processing frameworks, and how well they would work with business rules. There are vendors for CEPs and looking at what it may bring to a enterprise in terms of flexibility is certainly worth it. Now any process modelling notations such as EPC and BPMN handle events. So there is already event information that can ba managed by the business. so just like business rules, events are present at the different layers of an enterprise's business.

So three ideas about BPM agility out of a post at a BRMS conference. BPM, Services, events and business rules can all work together. We just have to show that in rea world use cases and complex scenarios, I would be very happy to write apost about someone who goves a presentation about such a thing.

Anyways, I have been reading some of the posts at DIALOG08 and many are very interesting. I'll keep on reviewing whatever has to do with BRMS, BPM, SOA and compliance.

Marwane El Kharbili.

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.

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.

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.

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

What is SOA?....

I lately stumbled upon this website by Thomas Erl on SOA: What is SOA? He makes good point by pointing out the string confusion about SOA: "[...]there still remains a significant amount of confusion as to what exactly constitutes a service-oriented architecture. Some qualify an SOA project by the fact that Web services technologies are being used, while others classify SOA as a Web-centric variation of object-oriented design[...]".

It is true that many people understand SOA wrong, the most usual confusion being that with web services. SOA also is at the origin of strong discussions among experts, as to whether it is the right approach to achieve goals in flexible and reusable component-based architectures. The confrontation REST Vs. SOA is the one I heard and read about the most. One is clear, the industry strongly pushes SOA, as being the effort to standardize all methods and techniques that may have existed or been partly supported/implemented and that seek to reach the same goals as SOA does.

Marwane El Kharbili

WebSphere SOA and J2EE in Practice

WebSphere SOA and J2EE in Practice is the name of the IBM developerworks blog maintained by Bobby Woolf. The blog handles pretty much technical topics of currently highly relevant technologies. I'm speaking about SOA, J2EE (Of course, when speaking about Websphere). This, in the context of using IBM's J2EE products: Rational Application Server, Websphere Application Server, Websphere Process Server and Websphere Integration Developer.

The author of the blog has background in consulting using IBM's products and works for the IBM Software Services for Websphere unit of IBM. He authored the "Exploring IBM SOA technology and Practice" and co-authored 2 others.

There is an accompanying Wiki to the blog, although I personnally didn't see the point, till I read Bobby Wolf's answer to that question, here. As a foretaste to what the blog is about, read the post from the 31st of January, where a definition of Services as "Service Contract" is given. Interesting read from a very practice-related perspective.

For readers who are interested in the technical implementation of business processes (we at the IDS concentrate on "real" BPM, so-called Business BPM :D), this blog might give many interesting ideas about how questionings and experience in SOA and IBM's J2EE products. One to keep an eye on anyway!

Marwane El Kharbili.