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.

Microsoft and the future of quantum computing

...Is the 1st April joke by Microsoft folks on Channel 9. And when you have a look at the reactions and the comments, many people have fallen down for this :D I must say, hadn't it been the comments, I would have believed that a team of genius software architects and astrophysicists have gotten together under the umbrella of the "Quantum Unreality Computation Group" and developed the revolutionary Quark product. This product is the ultimate quantum computing machine, the solution everybody dreamed of to revolutionize parallel computing. Don't look for this one on Microsoft's catalogs, you won't find it. the only thing that betrays the prank is that at the end of the 30 minute video where Dr. Beckman very handily explains the quantum theory behind the discovery, both the reporter and him eventually finish laughing their heart out, lol. If you want to get a not so serious idea about how quantum jokes made by Microsoft look like, get the video!

Marwane El Kharbili.

Business rules, COBOL and Mainframes

Ilog have announced their new Cobol Add-On for Jrules, on the 19.02.2008. I read 2 posts about this here and here too. It should simplify SOA governance for legacy systems. It is destined to be used with legacy systems and in particular mainframe systems upon which applications are coded in COBOL. No need to say that finding programmers which still have much experience in COBOL is no easy task, and maintaining these applications is getting harder. But for companies that have invested much in these mainframe systems, the question of leaving these systems behind doesn't even pose itself. using the COBOL add-on for JRules is a way of outsourcing the business Rules embedded in theses mainframes to manage them. This also allows an SOA integration of these systems by invoking COBOL code through the business rules. COBOL code can also be generated from business rules. So quite an interesting application of business rules to legacy systems. I had heard a webcast by the guys from Corticon about how to realize such a legacy modernization and they were tackling the same topic. So it looks like business rules management system providers see this field of legacy systems as a very important one to their expansion strategy.

Marwane El Kharbili.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.