Category: services

(micro-)service oriented architecture

Gartner Day 2: Daryl Plummer

The second day started with a keynote by Daryl Plummer, BPM/SOA Elixir (unfortunately, I missed the breakfast session with Michele Cantara about the BPMS market, but I ended up in a fascinating discussion about requirements collaboration using wikis with Jason Klemow, and the concept of subscribing to processes with specific attributes in a BPM with Dennis Nickel of Telus).

Plummer obviously likes to play with the new technology, which I suppose is a prerequisite for his job: he talks about TiVo and Second Life as things that are fast becoming essential parts of culture, although it’s clear that few people in the audience (except maybe me) embrace both the concept of downloading and consuming what I want when I want it, and the importance of online social networks.

He starts with some basic definitions of “service”, especially the relationship between processes and services, to drive home the idea that SOA impact people too, not just systems. He also made an excellent distinction between a model-driven (process-centric) view and a typical programmer view of things: a model-driven view describes what a person does (the business process); a programmer view describes what the system does (the code that attempts to implement that process). After having a discussion earlier about defining processes based on the data values that flow through those processes, when I couldn’t quite elucidate why that wasn’t ultimately the right way to do things, this strikes me as an important distinction.

He summarized the results of Gartner’s 2006 CIO survey (“CIOs are programmers that are passin’ for normal folk”), where the top business trend is improving business processes: there’s a lot of pressure all around to automate processes and improve them along the way, and this is going to happen only with both SOA and BPM. Plummer takes the enterprise architecture view of this, which I really appreciate — business context and functions driving from the top of the architectural view, and services as a way to fulfill the needs of the business. Processes need services to be implemented quickly and effectively, and services aren’t of use unless they are consumed by processes. SOA allows us to build an infrastructure of shared services for ready consumption by processes.

One of the key reasons for SOA and shared services is that legacy apps are still hanging around, in spite of all our efforts to get rid of them. Adding a service layer over the legacy apps allows us to create higher-level services and processes that consume these services without having to know how — or even what platform — to access the data directly on its original platform.

SOA, as Plummer reinforces, is an architectural style: not web services (although web services can be used to implement SOA), not a particular product, but encapsulated functionality accessed through a standardized interface that allows for loose coupling of services and applications. He goes through a checklist of how to know SOA when you see it, although some of the items on his list (such as a centrally managed runtime middleware network) are not, strictly speaking, an essential part of SOA.

He continues on with a discussion of event-driven processes (he refers to them as event-driven services in counterpoint to BPM-driven services, which is not necessarily a separation that I agree with). Services, properly implemented, can be combined into event-driven processes rather than structured, pre-defined processes, in order to be able to respond to events that happen in an unexpected order or manner. I did, however, like his view of the “new” application container: UI and navigation via a portal, security and management as part of the network, and logic and data accessed via services from wherever they might exist. Explicit orchestration ties all this together, which provides agility in the process model.

He points out that an SOA is never finished: in fact, it’s designed to never be finished. He uses the analogy of the Sagrada Familia in Barcelona, a cathedral that’s been under construction for more than 100 years now, and continues to change as it is built. He covers off some things about development techniques to be used when developing services within an SOA infrastructure, and highlights the business service repository as a centrepiece for BPM’s use of SOA.

His final recommendation is that the critical path to competitive business advantage goes through SOA and BPM: you need to use SOA as the underlying mechanism, BPM as the methodology for tying things together in order to get the business process improvement that’s required to differentiate your organization in the marketplace.

Gartner Day 1: Lombardi customer session

Metastorm and Lombardi both did something that I really dislike: instead of running two 30-minute sessions after lunch, as the schedule would indicate, they ran a 1-hour session that spanned the two 30-minute spots. Since I had planned to see one session of each, I ended up feeling a bit unfulfilled by both.

Anyway, I attended the second half of the Lombardi session, Process-Driven: We’ve Only Just Begun, and heard Tim Barnes of Devon Canada (an oil & gas company) speak about how they were trying to improve communication between data, applications, processes, people and companies. For them, this is all about integration, and in fact started with an EAI team. They’ve brought in Lombardi TeamWorks, but are still figuring out how to tie that back to their ESB and their previous integration efforts. They’ve defined their best practices, but are still at the point of developing shared services.

They’ve done three smallish BPM projects so far, and he spoke about the HR onboarding process that they automated, with some degree of difficulty. One of the big problems was that the people on the project knew how to implement applications, but didn’t really get process, which required a complete team refresh — Janelle Hill spoke about exactly this issue this morning of having people on the team who are process-savvy.

Their next steps are to develop their BPM architecture and develop a formal life cycle around BPM initiatives, as well as enhance their existing BPM centre of excellence.

He was followed by Steve Schade of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (a.k.a. Mormons) discussing how they’ve applied BPM technology to their extensive geneaology project. They have a ton of family history records on microfiche, but if they were to image all of it (as they have done with some of it), there would be 19 PB (that’s 19,000 TB) of data, so they’re looking for alternatives in the process of putting this data online and searchable on their FamilySearch.org website. They had been doing some ad hoc scanning and indexing of records, but needed a scalable process where they could pinpoint inefficiences and get some control and visibility over the process.

In their first BPM implementation, they took a process that formerly took weeks to execute, and reduced the time to hours, while moving control of the project setup from IT to the business area. Through an obviously good selection of an initial project, plus good training and rollout plans, they had a big success on their hands. On their second project, they took on something that’s more complex, and which Schade thought might be a bit more than they could handle, but they’re still working away at it. They used Lombardi’s professional services and outside consultants on the first project to get them moving, and consider this essential to their success. They also see having business operations invovled in process modelling as key.

Gartner Day 1: Benoit Lheureux

I decided on Benoit Lheureux’ session on BPM’s role in multi-enterprise commerce, although we’re had some technical difficulties and started late. This is much more about B2B and middleware than BPM, so it should be interesting to hear the perspective from the B2B viewpoint. If this turns out to be a dog, I’ll be out of here for Process Modelling for Profit, but the slides look interesting and I’m very interested in inter-organization collaboration and process choreography. He just used the word “mashup”, so I think that I’m staying, although the slightly smarmy “my friends” method of address did put me off a bit.

By now, the Gartner presentation framework is clear: each has exactly 20 slides; each has a Key Issues (agenda) slide with exactly 3 points (although Lheureux cheated by inserting a few extra slides that weren’t in the downloaded version of the presentation). People with 120-slide presentations, take note of how the professionals do it.

Lheureux describes his research as looking at multi-enterprise integration, or how to bind your business processes with the business processes of your trading partners. He opens with the question of how tightly you should be binding your applications and business processes with those of your business partners.

He makes the bold statement “EDI software is dead”, having been replaced by B2B gateway software that is more process-aware, and sees B2B projects as proliferating — doubling in the next five years — since there is a widespread recognition that organizations realize that their business processes are not just internal any more, and B2B needs to be a strategy rather than a discrete project. It used to be that you had your applications running internally, with some degree (if you’re lucky) of internal visibility, but no external integration or visibility: you’d need some sort of manual process for providing both integration and visibility to external business partners. Now, however, you can’t be competitive working that way any more. Furthermore, some of the functions done within organizations are being outsourced, further driving B2B requirements.

Gartner predicts that by 2011, 25% of new business software will be delivered as SaaS. Not 25% of what you’re running in total, but 25% of the new stuff; still, that’s huge. And I drink that particular Kool-Aid: I believe that this shift is happening now, and will continue to grow. SaaS is one form of B2B, in that you’re integrating in some way with the SaaS provider, but this also provides the potential to integrate with other trading partners via the SaaS platform itself. In addition to the SaaS model of multi-enterprise integration, there’s also the more traditional EDI-style e-commerce, plus integration via portals or mashups.

Lheureux discusses three approaches for implementing these B2B projects: run your own B2B gateway, outsource the B2B infrastructure (previously “EDI VAN”), or outsource the entire B2B project (previously “managed EDI”). He then dug into the issues of the choreography and monitoring of multi-enterprise BPM.

Gartner also predicts that by 2011, at least 40% of all new multi-enterprise integration projects will use BPMS. I can agree with this one too; besides, I figure if it doesn’t look like it’s going to come true, Gartner will just change the definition of BPM again. 🙂

He then discussed the four multi-enterprise BPM styles:

  1. Blind document/transaction exchange, e.g., exchange purchase orders, to lower transaction cost, latency and errors by increasing automation. No shared process visibility or execution, and the process is difficult to change.
  2. Intelligent document/transaction exchange, e.g., shared view of order-to-cash process, to provide some process visibility.
  3. Multi-enterprise applications, e.g., shared execution of vendor-managed inventory, to centralize process control. This maximizes process visibility since both trading partners are participating in the same process (not just exposing a limited view of an internal process from one to another), but this is a big thing to do and requires a great deal of trust between the trading partners.
  4. Multi-enterprise BPMS and rules, e.g., shared compliance management, in order to centralize the process and rules definition. This increases flexibility considerably, but again requires a great deal of trust and collaboration between the trading partners in order to make this work.

Organizations are going to have to implement more than one of these styles of multi-enterprise integration over the next few years as this field evolves. And if you’re already using B2B, B2B-enabled middleware or BPM, portals, SaaS or a variety of other technologies, then you already have some of the infrastructure in place to get started at this. The support for B2B versions of many of the standard BPM functionalities is just not there yet, however: practically no one is doing B2B process simulation, for example.

He ended up with some recommendations for multi-enterprise BPM strategy, such as synchronizing multi-enterprise and internal BPM projects, and developing a shared B2B infrastructure, with a focus on enabling shared process visibility (via BAM) and shared process control (via business rules).

Microsoft and IDS Scheer partner for process modelling

Vendor announcements are dropping from the trees around here this week, but I found this one particularly interesting after my trip to the IDS Scheer user conference a few weeks ago: Microsoft has selected IDS Scheer as a preferred business process modelling/monitoring partner in the newly-formed Business Process Alliance. Now, before you get too excited, the press release says “a” preferred partner, not “the one and only”, implying that other business process modelling and monitoring companies might also be invited to the dance; right now, the Alliance lists AmberPoint, Ascentn, Fair Isaac, Global 360, InRule, Metastorm, PNMsoft, RuleBurst and K2.net as members, so no other modelling but lots of competing business rules and BPM vendors. (By the way, Microsoft’s incorrect use of “is comprised of” on their page — sloppy editing.)

There’s a real-world example of the ARIS UML Designer (now part of ARIS SOA Architect) being used to model business processes for execution in BizTalk at Siemens IT Operations over the past 2 years, so this is built on a pretty strong success story. This provides BizTalk with a fully functional process designer, which was not a strong suit of theirs in the past.

It’s not clear to me whether this is anything beyond a co-marketing campaign; presumably, the existing BPEL export from ARIS would serve for import into BizTalk, or IDS Scheer may choose to do a closer “standards-based” (but not standard) integration such as they have done with SAP and Oracle.

I have to say, however, that I had strong negative feelings about the term Alliance since I first watched the TV series Firefly: they’re the authoritarian bad guys, right? Or maybe they only look bad from the little guy’s viewpoint. 🙂

ProcessWorld Day 2: Keynote with Dr. Wolfram Jost

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.

ProcessWorld Day 1: BPM for SOA breakout with Bill Swanton of AMR Research

For the first breakout session today, I heard Bill Swanton, who’s VP Research at AMR Research. Although the topic was “BPM is the value in SOA”, Swanton talked a lot about SOA-ing your ERP. AMR has obviously done a lot of research in this area, and he had some good thoughts on the ERP long-term lifecycle. ERP systems are often monolithic, and therefore not so easily pushed aside or interfaced with services. What ends up happening is “SOA by evolution”, where an ERP system (he mentioned SAP ERP and Oracle Fusion in particular) is wrapped to create specific service interfaces, although the  internal processes remain fixed.

He did discuss the use of technology is a catalyst for changes in business, and stated from their research that 66% of organizations implementing SOA are hoping to improve their business processes. I’m not sure that I agreed with his characterization of BPM and BAM as “key components of SOA”, but I loved the analogy of SOA as the corporate “patch panel”.

He had an interesting chart about how SOA needs vary with the complexity/enterprise spread of existing systems, and degree of customization. If different software is used in different business units and there’s a lot of customization, then the goal of SOA is usually to reduce development costs and reuse existing custom software; there will be a tendency to layer custom layers on top of the existing custom development. At the opposite corner of the chart, where an organization has an enterprise-wide ERP with little customization, they’re looking to compose unique business processes out of the ERP vendor’s provided services that can be a competitive differentiator for them.

Swanton sees a number of short-term challenges — and therefore slower ROI — as organizations transition from traditional applications through hybrid solutions to a true SOA, one of these being the showdown between ERP and SOA vendors for same space. He notes that the ERP vendors are not, in general, making radical changes, which seemed to imply that the SOA vendors might pull ahead on this front.

BPM/SOA Primer

Great webinar on BPM Basics today, BPM & SOA, where John Lojek gave an "18-Minute BPM and SOA Primer". Definitely a good introduction to the subject, particularly around the differences between BPM and SOA, and how they fit together.

Phil Larson of Appian followed with some practical advice on using SOA and BPM together, such as enforcing SLAs and securing services, with very little blatant plugging of his product — not bad for a marketing guy! 🙂

SOA in Action Conference replays

If you missed the SOA in Action online conference last week, you can view replays of the presentations on the site.

There’s a presentation with Ken Vollmer from Forrester entitled “What is the relationship between BPM and SOA and why should you care?” that starts with the ever-present history of BPM, a topic that I’ve covered in some detail as well. At the BPM Think Tank in May, I wrote about his colleague at Forrester, Connie Moore, and how she showed a simplistic view of how BPM evolved from workflow, and talked about Vollmer’s equally simplistic view that BPM evolved from EAI. Now, at least, he seems to be singing the more comprehensive tune of how it evolved from both workflow and EAI (maybe they were reading my blog? 🙂 ). With the recent convergence of integration-focussed and human-centric BPM tools through corporate acquisitions, it’s hard to ignore this bigger picture.

He covers both business and IT drivers for BPM, including how many integration-focussed BPMS have SOA at their core. I have a bit of a problem with his slide #12 that shows a big “SOA” label around workflow, process modelling, BAM, business rules and a number of other things that clearly are not part of SOA, although they are certain to have services somewhere in their underpinnings — call it integration-focussed BPM, but not SOA. Aside from that, he gives a good overview of both BPM and SOA, and spends a bit of time talking about how SOA can help to facilitate development outsourcing. Of course, I also think that BPM can help to facilitate process outsourcing by removing location dependence at any particular step in a process, but he doesn’t mention that.

He then gets down to the meat of it — BPM and SOA together — and his key argument is that SOA provides a standards-based approach for implementing BPM. That true, but he totally misses what BPM does for SOA: SOA needs BPM to orchestrate the services into business processes that can include human-facing steps, and also to provide the more robust modelling, simulation and monitoring tools that are available in BPM suites. BPM is SOA’s “killer app”, the thing that will drive acceptance of SOA in the business areas and open up the business purse-strings needed to support this in the long term.

When it comes down to it, Vollmer is an SOA guy, and this was an SOA conference presentation. However, I think that if you’re going to talk about BPM and SOA, you shouldn’t just do it from an SOA perspective.

webMethods takes a big step into BPM

I had a chat this morning with Kristin Muhlner, webMethods‘ EVP of Product Development, and I have to say that it’s refreshing to have a discussion with another technical woman for a change, since there’s really not enough of us in this industry. 🙂

The reason for our call was to discuss webMethods’ announcement today about their upcoming release of webMethods Fabric 7.0, which will include new BPM functionality that they are using to launch into the BPM suite market — a move that will place them squarely in competition with TIBCO and IBM (this latter depending on whether someone at IBM wakes up and realizes that the BPM product that they just acquired with FileNet would perfectly round out their WebSphere suite, but that’s a topic for another day).

This change in strategic direction for webMethods has been 18 months in the making, and they’ve released a new Eclipse-based process modelling environment that takes on a different personality depending on whether the user is a business analyst or a developer. Following the direction of other BPM vendors, this can be run as a standalone desktop tool without connection to a server, and although they’re not making it a free download like Savvion has done, I have the sense that that’s being discussed. One key flaw that I could see is that although they’re modelling in BPMN, they’re serializing only to BPEL for transfer to an execution environment, not to XPDL; unfortunately, not everything that you can model in BPMN can be saved to BPEL, so I’m not sure what their solution is for this. Obviously, they must be using some other format for transferring to their own execution environment. I’ve asked for a demo of the product over the next few days, so I hope to be able to resolve this question then.

We had the inevitable discussion about browser-based modelling tools — I think that offering a modelling tool for business analysts in a browser lowers the bar significantly for adoption across an enterprise, something that modelling vendors like Proforma have already figured out — but webMethods isn’t offering that in the current product release.

The goal of this process modeller, as with many of the other BPM vendors’ modellers, is to become so ubiquitous in an organization that the business analysts no longer use Visio to model processes, but use this tool instead. That’s quite a different approach from vendors like Fujitsu, who extend Visio using something like Zynium’s Byzio, as I’ve discussed previously. In both cases, however, vendors are looking to eliminate the translation errors that occur now when Visio diagrams are manually re-created in a BPM vendor’s modelling tool, by allowing a direct import of the process definition from the modelling environment, whether that’s Visio or a proprietary modeller. The advantage of what webMethods provides is all the things that you don’t have in an enhanced Visio environment, such as rich documentation capabilities, the ability to design KPIs directly into the process for later linking with BAM, and an environment that allows business analysts and developers to collaborate more easily. I think that they’re going to have to make this a free downloadable product in order to really see market penetration, however. They also provide a codeless development environment that allows a developer to just drag and drop services and pre-built AJAX components in order to build a custom application. And, speaking of BAM, they’ve included BAM, simulation and business rules integration in the BPM suite, too.

An advantage that webMethods will have is that the BPM suite is built directly on top of their existing integration platform, which gives them a way to mine their existing customer base of integration/SOA implementations to expand to include BPM.