More big vs small thinking: SOA vs BPM
I was on the way back to the office from a briefing with BPM vendor Pegasystems yesterday, where we'd had an interesting discussion about the relative roles that BPM and SOA can play in business transformation for customers.
We agreed that BPM, done right, is as much of a discipline that organisations can use to transform the way that they do business, as it is a technology (or set of technologies). What's more, we observed that many BPM initiatives revolve around making big changes to the way that organisations deal with customers, partners and suppliers - and creating organisations that are really focused around delivering real service to those other parties.
Let's review that for a second: BPM thinking helps organisations get their houses in order so that they can deliver coherent and quality services (and not just disjointed experiences).
So from a business perspective, it's BPM that delivers service-orientation!
But wait - in IT we're saying that service-orientation comes from something called SOA. And in IT circles, there's a lot of discussion that positions BPM as if it's a layer of technology that sits on top of SOA technology. Kind of like we've just reinvented three-tier application design with BPM instead of business logic, and SOA instead of database access logic.
This "application architecture" lens for BPM and SOA is all wrong. It's another example of
small thinking.
The more profitable way of thinking about the relationship between BPM and SOA is not to think of them as a stack of technologies: it's to think of BPM as being about "how" you do things and service-orientation being about "what" you do. Service definitions are definitions of commitments: they say what you will do, how well you can do it, and (possibly) how much it will cost you to use. Process definitions are definitions of work: they say how commitments will be fulfilled, by whom, and under what conditions.
So, BPM and SOA are interlinked - but not because one adds value to the other or because one sits on top of the other: both ideas are two sides of the same "business and IT transformation" coin.
If you do insist on thinking of the world in terms of stacks of technology tools or stacks of models or assets, think of SOA and BPM as alternating layers of concepts and practices. Services define "what" you will do at a given level; processes define "how" services will be delivered. Processes rely on foundation services to get some work done; those services in turn rely on processes of some kind.
I'm sure not everyone will agree with this, but I do hope there's one thing we can all agree on - as
Sinatra once sang: "this, I tell you brother: you can't have one without the other."
Labels: architecture, BPM, Pegasystems, SOA
Early praise for SOA strategy planning tool
Just saw
this great comment from Enterprise Architect blogger James McGovern.
This site is incredibly useful. It was developed by MWD so you know it is of high quality.
Thanks so much James - what an endorsement!
If you want to get to grips with your competency levels in the context of SOA, and learn how you can improve them and plan a SOA strategy, visit
http://www.itstrategyplans.com/soa.
Labels: MWD, SOA, strategy planning
Getting the right focus for IT governance
I've long been a fan of Nick Malik's
blog - and indeed it was his blog that led me to ask him if he'd be happy to be interviewed for
our book on IT-business alignment.
In this post Nick nails quite a few aspects of IT governance, and explains how they fit in the context of embarking on an SOA initiative.
Nick correctly calls out the dual roles of governance: not only in directing work so that things are "done right"; but also in directing work so that we "do the right things". The former area is the one where IT departments are most comfortable: you can focus on getting things right while retaining a very internal IT perspective. Doing the latter and focusing on doing the right things requires another set of skills and commitments that are less familiar to most.
It's easy to look at governance as Nick outlines it (and as many others do too, including us in our book) and say "hmm, this looks like a pretty heavyweight overhead to me. If I'm going to have to make significant extra investment in this governance stuff, how can I make the case for it?"
The key point here is that one of the things that makes IT governance "good" is fitness for purpose. Governance doesn't have to entail masses of documentation, full-time headcount, onerous processes and big technology investments. As Nick implies, a key feature of governance work is agreeing a strategic destination and a set of navigation charts.
In this context, your focus shouldn't be securing headcount and defining processes: it should be on securing agreements and commitments from people to work together.
Labels: book, governance
New SOA strategy planning tool - live from today
Today we're delighted to announce that our SOA strategy planning tool, hosted at
www.itstrategyplans.com/soa, is now live. This is a new thing for us and if you're interested in SOA, we think you'll find it useful.
What we've launched is a comprehensive, interactive, and vendor-independent online tool that goes much further than IT vendors' own online SOA assessment tools - and crucially, there's nothing behind it that is going to steer you towards buying tools or technologies from a particular company.
You can use the tool, free of charge, to determine your levels of competence in six areas that are crucial to SOA success: concepts, strategy, architecture, organisation and people, governance, and technology and infrastructure. On top of that, you can quickly see how your levels of competence compare to average industry benchmark scores.
As I said above, access to these features costs nothing.
If you want to know how your competence levels affect your SOA strategy and how you can reduce the costs and risks associated with SOA, then for a modest fee (normally £200 - but if you purchase before the end of September 2007, it's £130) you can gain access to premium features. With premium access you can generate personalised action planning reports that clearly lay out actions you need to take in order to improve your competency levels - as well as providing more detailed breakdowns of how you compare to the benchmark averages (across your industry, geography and company size).
You can use premium access to generate as many reports as you like, whenever you like. So as your SOA programme progresses and you gain more experience and capability, you can revisit the tool and gain new insights.
It's been a long, long road, and we (and our partner
JEMM Research) have put in months of effort to get here since we started work on this project back in November 2006. This has been a major investment for us - so why have we done it?
There are two reasons. Firstly, of course, we'll be delighted when people decide they want to buy premium access to the tool. That's easy. Just as importantly, though, we wanted to try and find new ways of learning about how companies are pursuing key IT initiatives. By building tools like this one and inviting people to use them to learn about their competence levels and how they can improve, we're also able to look at aggregated usage data from the tool to see how industries are grappling with SOA, and how the situation is changing over time.
For a group of companies that talks so much about technology innovation, we've found that the IT industry analyst community is generally pretty slow at trying to use technology in new ways. As a small company we can perhaps make bolder moves more quickly - and that's what we're trying to do here. If we see success with this tool, we'll be launching more over time, focusing on different types of IT initiative.
So - please
check out the tool, give us your feedback, and let us know if there are other areas you think we should apply this approach to!
Labels: MWD, SOA, strategy planning
