Reflecting the reality of business processes - a start
Microsoft yesterday announced the availability of its Presence Controls for Microsoft Office Communicator, to enable enterprises and partners to integrate presence and Office Communicator’s instant messaging capabilities into applications using Visual Studio. The company is also providing some code samples for role-based presence and instant messaging and for team-based alerting (through integration with Active Directory). A number of partners, Siebel amongst them, were on hand to endorse Microsoft’s strategy.Back in May my partner commented on the real-world complexity of business processes: “Business processes are rich, collaborative, often unpredictable and organic. It's just that the shadow that they cast onto IT - the systems that we have built to automate parts of business processes - is highly structured and often rigid.” – and highlighted the inherent danger in assuming that real business processes look like the shadow they cast – “we all miss the real challenge of enterprise use of IT in the next five years: harnessing all kinds of information management and communication technologies, and blending them in ways that truly provide structured support for business processes as they really are.”Microsoft’s announcement, IBM’s strategy with Workplace and its recent announcement of the Eclipse-based IBM Workplace Designer for the creation of Workplace composite applications and Skype’s SkypeNet API are just a few examples of vendor strategies to unite the traditionally disparate IT worlds of ad-hoc, dynamic collaboration and structured, rigid process automation. This is only a start, however, and there’s still a long way to go before the much-vaunted promises BAM, BPM, ESA, MDA, SOA and numerous other TLA proponents will be realised.
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