I don’t usually blog about breakfast, but I happened to end up sitting with Marc Kase of SAIC, whose presentation that I posted about yesterday.
We had a great discussion about how they organize their team of business architects and business analysts, training, collaboration within the team and to their internal customers; Marc obviously has a good handle on how to create and manage such a diverse team of skills.
My question of the week is about integration between ARIS (or any process modelling environment) and a business process execution environment, whether a full BPMS or something that fits more into the SOA layer, and Marc confirmed my suspicions that the unidirectional interfaces are problematic for a variety of reasons, and not used within their environment of ARIS and the BEA AquaLogic BPMS (Fuego). They only provide a high-level process view to the (separate and IT-focussed) BPMS team, who then redraw it in BEA and add a lot of detail required for execution. This creates the opportunity for translation errors between the model and the implementation, although their ultimate QA is against the process models in ARIS in order to reduce those effects. Marc expressed that the lack of round-tripping was a factor in them not using direct integration as well.
I also found out that Vince, the senior business architect who accompanied Marc in his presentation, is Vince Outlaw of AboutEA — a blogger with whom I have exchanged links and comments. We discovered Vince in the internet cafe (of course) for an introduction, thereby creating one more real-world link to strengthen the ties of bloggers.