In this Global Economy Crisis (GEC) one would think the employing Business Process Management (BPM) ideals in combination with Services-Oriented Architecture (SOA) to do process execution would be the most logical step…

We call this building composite applications. Why would you spend money in both setting up this Architecture and using technologies that allow process execution to help you?

1. Companies will most likely not want to buy anymore new application systems
2. They might not even want to build new systems too
3. So if current and legacy systems are here to stay for now, how can we maximise its potentials?
4. Business Process Management endeavours to apply a structured discipline to improving, measuring and continuously optimise processes

So if BPM allows you to analyse and document your processes to continually improve them, coupled with SOA’s ideal of orchestrating these same processes defined to pretty much reuse the functionality of existing systems… Wouldn’t that be the best and most logical cost saving exercise an organisation could adopt? And yet retrenchment and other non-value added measures are deployed to save money in this credit crunch time. Key question: “If you don’t know your business processes and its criticality, how do you know where to optimise, shed and save?”. Sadly, in some cases, the BPM initiative itself is the first program to be taken off in efforts to save money…

The true crutz of process to execution is to be able to use technology to physically “translate” from a modelling notation (e.g. EPC, Event-Drive Process Chains,BPMN, Business Process Modelling Notation or even UML’s Activity Diagrams) to something IT can use to compile into some engine or code. Example? BPEL – Business Process Execution Language.

Many vendors and technologies actually already allows this “no-loss-in-translation-type” transformation. Concepts great and simple! I’ve model my process design and requirements in a comfortable business-type notation and somehow it gets translated into something IT can understand and “do something with”, IT-wise to get it working. Great!

However, many people don’t talk about the details… The real transformation! It’s like trying to translate English into Mandarin or vice-versa. Because the anatomy of the language is essentially different, there are things that are required and are lost when it is actually translated. Some level of “massaging” is required… Some simple examples below:

1. “Wait events” in business terms indicate that there is a time lapse involved. From an IT view that could be asynchronous or just simply another (IT) process. This context then gets ignored or lost.
2. (IT) processes operate in a very “transactional” way. The concept of multiple start and end events triggering itself or others is quite foreign to BPEL. Workaround is again to ignore this as it is something business needs to know but when IT puts it together, it doesn’t really matter.

There are a few more interesting qwerks when we transition from Business into IT. I suppose these “qwerks” transend into many levels both socially and technologically!

I must be working too long in this space. You know this when you even have bookmark to links like this!

Hope everyone had a well rested Christmas break and new year celebrations. We’re back and to start of the new year, SOAInstitute.org published it’s first newsletter with an interesting article suggesting a SOA roadmap (article in link below).

http://www.soainstitute.org/articles/article/article/developing-an-soa-roadmap.html?tac=105p

As rightly stated in this newletter, “SOA is not journey not a project”, these six broad steps highlight the importance of this being a journey. Although we all know that there are many many steps, roadblocks, pain, happiness and tears along any “roadmaps”, at least this is a start in a new direction of a different perspective. Hopefully the day will come when presenters at conferences starts their speech with “Looking back at our successful SOA journey, we…” instead of saying, “In this successful SOA project,  we…”

I suggest you join SOAinstitute.org for some very interesting articles in your mailbox often. Almost every month there is something useful to read.

BPM and SOA Maturity

Going into the new year, I’ve decided to finally start this blog. I registered this blog site probably 4-5 months ago and haven’t done anything until now. Due to various strings of events, I finally got kicked in the butt to start writing something. So here it is! The first entry to wind up the year 2008 and in 2009 (all things crossed), we’ll have useful blogs on all things to do with executing processes.

So many might say, “what is business process to execution?”, some might even say “oh no! not another SOA blog site!”. A quick search on google would yield many results on SOA and BPM the 2 big buzz words these days. What many might not have are practical advice and insights on how to align the 2. Do we want to align the 2 at all? How do we do it? NO, I won’t try to just simply suggest a book to learn how (unless I wrote that book). What hopefully this blog can give you are practical advice, incite interesting discussions and point you to relevant and useful information about the world of Business Processes, its execution via SOA (or other means). And hopefully provide the elusive answer for “how in the world do we manage this all?!”