Dr. Jost started the day with a presentation on “The Basis for Linking BPM & SOA”. Someone may have been reading one of my posts from yesterday, because when he put up the obligatory slide of VW, he referred to them as “Volkswagen — of course, you know who they are”. 🙂
His talk was part ARIS product marketing and part generic material on BPM and SOA.
There was a lot on the separation of modelling and execution environments, or what he characterized as “business BPM” (business process strategy, design, implementation and controlling) and “technical BPM” (define, create, execute, monitor) — really, it’s like layers in a Zachman or other enterprise architecture diagram, although he didn’t really make that distinction. ARIS is used in the upper layer of functions/definitions, with links to the technical BPM functions in the lower layer.
He did have some nice slides and explanations of BPM and SOA: BPM as a management discipline involved in strategy, design, implementation and measurement of business processes, with the purpose of continuously improve the productivity and degree of innovation of business processes; SOA as an architectural style of business applications based on distributable, sharable and loosely coupled modules, with the purpose to improve the flexibility of business applications needed to support changes in business processes with less time and effort. He showed a 3-layer model of strategy (business model), BPM (business processes) and SOA (business applications), where there might be changes at any of these levels that would ripple through the others: strategy could change due to market forces; business processes could change due to organizational changes, and applications could change due to technology innovations.
Another point that he made, and one that I used in my response to Phil Gilbert‘s comment on one of my posts yesterday, there’s value in using modelling tools that are separate from the BPMS themselves, especially if you’re creating the business models in advance of technology acquisition, or if you have a variety of process execution environments and want a single modelling environment for your business analysts. Of course, when Jost talks about business models being technology-independent, he’s excluding their own technology from that definition.
On the product side, Jost discussed the six solutions that they offer, which appear to be combining/packaging of existing products to address specific markets: Enterprise BPM, Enterprise Architecture, Process-Driven SAP, Business-Driven SOA, Process Intelligence & Performance, and Governance, Risk & Compliance. He also spoke about the new ARIS SOA Architect product, used to translate their “business BPM” into “technical BPM”.
The review of their multi-vendor platform strategy showed up some of the weaknesses that Phil Gilbert had mentioned in his comments yesterday: although they use BPEL and UML to interface bi-directionally with Oracle, and BPEL for bi-directionality with TIBCO, they use a much more tightly integrated — and proprietary — interface to SAP. Other BPMS products, including IBM WebSphere, Microsoft BizTalk, BEA and Fujitsu only have uni-directional exports, which is pretty useless in practical usage.
Jost finished up his talk with a quick review of the ARIS 2007 product roadmap.