toronto – Column 2

Smarter Infrastructure For A Smarter Planet

Kristof Kloeckner, IBM’s VP of Strategy & Enterprise Initiatives System and Software, & CTO of Cloud Computing, delivered today’s keynote on the theme of a smarter planet and IBM’s cloud computing strategy. Considering that this is the third IBM conference that I’ve been to in six months (Impact, IOD and now CASCON), there’s not a lot new here: people + process + information = smarter enterprise; increasing agility; connecting and empowering people; turning information into insights; driving effectiveness and efficiency; blah, blah, blah.

I found it particularly interesting that the person in charge of IBM’s cloud computing strategy would make a comment from the stage that he could see audience members “surreptitiously using their iPads”, as if those of us using an internet-connected device during his talk were not paying attention or connecting with his material. In actual fact, some of us (like me) are taking notes and blogging on his talk, tweeting about it, looking up references that he makes, and other functions that are more relevant to his presentation than he understands.

I like the slide that he had on the hype versus enterprise reality of IT trends, such as how the consumerization of IT hype is manifesting in industrialization of IT, or how the Big Switch is becoming reality through multiple deployment choices ranging from fully on-premise to fully virtualized public cloud infrastructure. I did have to laugh, however, when he showed a range of deployment models where he labeled the on-premise enterprise data center as a “private cloud”, as well as enterprise data centers that are on-premise but operated by a 3rd party, and enterprise infrastructure that is hosted and operated by a 3rd party for an organization’s exclusive use. It’s only when he gets into shared and public cloud services that he reaches what many of us consider to be “cloud”: the rest is just virtualization and/or managed hosting services where the customer organization still pays for the entire infrastructure.

It’s inevitable that larger (or more paranoid) organizations will continue to have on-premise systems, and might combine them with cloud infrastructure in a hybrid cloud model; there’s a need to have systems management that spans across these hybrid environments, and open standards are starting to emerge for cloud-to-enterprise communication and control.

Kloeckner feels that one of the first major multi-tenanted platforms to emerge(presumably amongst their large enterprise customers) will be databases; although it seems somewhat counterintuitive that organizations nervous about the security and privacy of shared services would use them for their data storage, in retrospect, he’s probably talking about multi-tenanted on-premise or private hosted systems, where the multiple tenants are parts of the same organization. I do agree with his concept of using cloud for development and test environments – I’m seeing this as a popular solution – but believe that the public cloud infrastructure will have the biggest impact in the near term on small and medium businesses by driving down their IT costs, and in cross-organization collaborative applications.

I’m done with CASCON 2010; none of the afternoon workshops piqued my interest, and tomorrow I’m presenting at a seminar hosted by Pegasystems in downtown Toronto. As always, CASCON has been a great conference on software research of all types.

Iterative Development in BPM Applications Using Traceability

The last speaker at the CASCON workshop is Sebastian Carbajales of the IBM Toronto Software Lab (on the WebSphere BPM team), on the interaction between a technical business analyst using WebSphere Business Modeler and an IT developer using WebSphere Integration Developer, particularly how changes made to the business-level model in WBM are reflected in WID. The business view is quite different from the IT view, and doesn’t necessarily directly represent the IT view; this is a common theme at this conference, and in general for vendors who don’t use a shared model approach but rely on some sort of model transformation. Given that there are two different models, then, how do business and IT collaborate in order to keep the models in sync?

They first looked at maintaining a separation of concerns between business and IT that would to minimize the need for changes by IT in response to a business change. This comes down to separating the business logic and rules from the implementation, and the separation of artifacts with well-defined logic from those with undefined logic. I’m not sure that I really get the distinction between the well-defined and undefined logic artifacts, or the benefits of separating them, although my instinct would be to externalize much of the business logic into a rules environment that the business analyst and/or business manager could manipulate directly.

They also looked at tool-assisted model merging to allow models to be compared in the specific user’s domain, then selectively apply and merge the changes into existing models. This would speed development as well as improve the model quality by reducing translation errors. There are some very similar concepts to those discussed in the previous paper on model change management, although with the added complexity of multiple modeling environments. A key goal is to improve the accuracy of model change detection, both to identify the objects in each model type as well as the relationships across the business-IT model transformation, and they used a traceability mechanism to do this. They generate a traceability map when the business to IT model transformation is originally done, capturing the identify of and the relationship between each object in the models, which allows traceability of changes on either model type.

He walked through a typical scenario, where the BA creates a process model in WBM, then exports/publishes it, where it is then imported by IT into WID and enhanced with implementation artifacts. When a change is made by the BA to the original model, and re-exported, that modified model is compared to enhanced WID model to create a new, merged WID model. Then, the change report is exported from WID, and any business-level changes are compared and merged back into the WBM model. Yikes.

Having a traceability map allows an IT developer to filter changes based on the business or IT artifacts, do visual comparisons and selective merging of the models. On the return trip, the BA can view updates to the process model, business services and business service objects that might impact the business logic, and select to apply them to the business-level models. The traceability is the key to model governance when multiple model types undergo transformations as part of the modeling and implementation lifecycle.

Following Carbajales’ presentation, we had a round-table discussion on the two process modeling themes of collaboration and consistency management to finish up the workshop. Some good ideas on the reality of business-IT collaboration in process modeling.

Process Model Change Management

Jochen Küster of the IBM Research Zurich lab (where they do a lot of BPM research), was first after the morning break at our CASCON workshop on collaboration and consistency management in BPM, presenting on process model change management. This was more of a technical talk about the tools required. As motivation, process models are a key part of model-driven development, and become input to the IT process modeling efforts for SOA implementations. Multiple models of different types will be created at different points in the modeling lifecycle, but individual models will also go through multiple revisions that need to be compared and merged. This sort of version management – that allows models to be compared with differences highlighted, then selectively merged – doesn’t exist in most process modeling tools, and didn’t exist at all in the IBM process modeling tools when their research started. This is different from just keeping a copy of all revised process models, where any one can be selected and used.

In order to do this sort of comparison and selective merging, it’s necessary to generate a change log that can be used for this purpose, logging not only atomic activities, but have those rolled up to compound operations to denote an entire process fragment. Furthermore, the merged model generated by the selective application of the changes must still be valid, and must be checked for correctness: a resolution of the changes following a detection of the changes.

The solution starts with a tree-like decomposition of the process model into fragments, with correspondences being determined between model elements and fragments; this was the subject of research by the Zurich lab that I saw presented at BPM 2008 in Milan on parsing using a refined process structure tree (PST). A key part of this is to identify the compound operations that denote the insertion, movement or deletion of a process fragment. The current research is focused on computing a joint PST (J-PST) for the merged process, which is the combination of two PSTs determined by the earlier decomposition, based on the correspondences found between the two models. The dependencies are also computed, that is, which process fragments and activities need to be inserted, moved or deleted before others can be handled.

The results of this research has been integrated into WebSphere Business Modeler v7.0, although not clear if this is part of production code, or a prototype integration. In the future, they’re looking at improving usability particularly around model difference resolution, then integrate and extend these concepts of change management and consistency checking to other artifacts such as use cases and SCA component diagrams.