Links for 2008-07-28 [del.icio.us]
Labels: MWD
BPM isn't yet "the killer app for SOA"
As part of our
BPM Continuous Advisory Service, we're carrying out twice-yearly research studies which capture information about the state of maturity and practice of BPM in European businesses. We've finally finished analysing the results of our first study, and published the report.
One of the most interesting things for me in processing all the findings from the study was that for now at least, making too simplistic a connection between BPM and SOA looks like being a risky thing to do. Where BPM and SOA initiatives exist in organisations today, all the signs point to them being conducted in completely separate worlds, by completely separate teams with wildly differing sets of assumptions and expectations.
We've highlighted other key findings of the study over on our
BPM blog, which is a key element of our BPM service but is freely accessible by anyone.
Labels: BPM, MWD, SOA
Businesses aren't machines, and enterprise architecture can't make them so
Via
Service Oriented Enterprise, I recently picked up an
Infoworld blog post by SOA journeyman David Linthicum, where he makes a couple of very strange points about SOA and ESBs. It may be, of course, that the post is pure
link bait: certainly, David appears to have said some relatively sane things in the past, so that might be it. If it is link bait, I'm going to fall for it now.
In his piece David quotes a representative from
iTKO, who repeats the now well-understood insight that in some large organisations, there's a challenge that arises because different groups with SOA initiatives find themselves having to integrate different ESBs in order to pull together implementations for cross-silo scenarios. He then goes on to comment (I’ve taken the liberty of extracting elements of his piece below):
First, if there is indeed 'enterprise architecture' and an 'enterprise architect' then the different divisions should not be using different ESBs, or even an ESB for that matter... Second, considering that my first point is correct (which it is), why the heck are you attempting to integrate these integration engines when they should perhaps be displaced altogether. Because, call me crazy again, that would be cheaper... just to be clear, you determine your requirements, and then the solutions patterns, and then the technology.
The most charitable explanation I can come up with for David's position is that he believes passionately in the transformational power of enterprise architecture. The problem with this perspective is that even where EA is highly effective (and in many places it isn't), it can at best only be one of many forces shaping the way that IT evolves to support changing business conditions and requirements, and each force has its own vector. Some forces, like a good EA team, try and combine business and technology focus, and promote the value of global optimisations, good practice and standardisation. But most of the most powerful forces are business forces, and in 99.99% of organisations, their power, when something really big and important happens, will trump any righteous splutterings emanating from IT departments.
As any experienced IT staffer who's been on the sharp end of a big business merger or acquisition, or even a radical change of leadership, will tell you, businesses don't act like machines that EAs can simply steer so that they tend towards technology optimisation. In fact, it's the opposite: business change forces (new competitors, new product launches, new market launches, new regulations, mergers and acquisitions, and so on) will always drive entropy, tending to push IT estates towards chaos. The best value an EA team can really provide in this environment is to help the IT organisation to absorb these changes with as little stress as possible, and drive consistent, planned responses.
Still, there's always been a vocal (and quite often technically brilliant) part of the IT industry that seems to misunderstand this, and persists in maintaining that once people see beautiful models, they'll modify their behaviour to enable the models to be made real. They see businesses as deterministic machines that can be algorithmically decomposed, analysed, predicted, and shaped. I can only think that David is one of these people.
Unfortunately, no matter how clever your EA team might be, no amount of architecture astronautics can make businesses change their nature.
Labels: EA, ESB, inside-out IT, SOA
If you want our take on where Oracle's taking BEA...
Read
this new report.
I know we're not the quickest off the mark, but we wanted to get the whole team working together to author something comprehensive, and with travel and so on, that took a few days.
We'll admit to being pessimistic about BEA's prognosis going into the Oracle acquisition, but Oracle's early communications highlight its understanding of the strengths of the BEA technology, as well as of BEA's market footprint. What's more, the company is also openly committing to support BEA customers' existing working relationships and arrangements, and has pledged not to force product migration on any customer. There is more that Oracle needs to do, of course, but this is a good start.
Labels: BEA, MWD, Oracle
New Collaboration Service Launch!
We are delighted to announce the launch of our second Continuous Advisory Service (CAS), which focuses on collaboration. Following the same format as our BPM Continuous Advisory Service (introduced in May), the
Collaboration service offers a combination of in-depth reports, an interactive online vendor comparison tool, and optional analyst access relating to topics covered within the service.
The service launch sees the publication of our first
Strategic Insight report, which examines the relationship between collaboration and knowledge management, and our first
Market Insight report, which assesses the value of consumer social networking standards such as OpenSocial within the enterprise.
In parallel with the new premium service, we have published four new reports into our free "Guest pass" research library: two reports which outline our approach to assessing collaboration software, and two new Vendor Capability Assessments (VCA) which focus on the collaboration software portfolios of
Microsoft and
IBM respectively.
If you want to have a look at the Collaboration Continuous Advisory Service for yourself, we're offering free, no-obligation trials that run for 7 days. You can register for a trial
here.
Labels: collaboration, MWD
Links for 2008-07-04 [del.icio.us]
Labels: MWD
Links for 2008-07-04 [del.icio.us]
Labels: MWD
Collaborative mind mapping
I don't usually blog about individual briefings from vendors, but I've just had a fascinating briefing from
Mindjet, a company which has developed an interactive, collaborative mind mapping solution based on its established personal mind mapping technology. Mindjet Connect allows multiple users to synchronously edit a central mind map, seeing what each other is editing in real time while maintaining full versioning and rollback, and combining this with communications-centric collaboration capabilities such as group chat, video conferencing, whiteboarding and desktop sharing. With almost 20 years of engineering and market experience, Mindjet should be in a good position to recognise the potential of its core solution, but what I think is interesting is that the company has created a slick, powerful and flexible collaborative application which sets a standard for many of the current new wave of collaboration software vendors. Where many talk about the power and innovation of wikis, I think the new Mindjet Connect solution competes very favourably in this space. I'll be writing an On The Radar report on Mindjet soon.
Labels: collaboration, Mindjet
