About Enterprise Architecture (AboutEA.com) - An Information Technology Weblog

Effective Business and IT Collaboration - Key to BPM and SOA Success - Devesh Sharma, Oracle

I've seen and written about the Oracle approach to BPM, including their Business Process Analysis (BPA) Suite which is essentially a branded version of ARIS with extensions to more closely integrate with their BP Execution platform. This presentation went into some of the surrounding standards, but I have to admit that the speaker talked very fast and not extremely clear...for a big room of people.

Here's one of the interesting slides from the presentation, showing SOA Roles (Business Analyst, Process Architect...something new I've seen a few times at this conference, and IT Analyst/Developer) and Responsibilities (Business Process Design, Business Service Mapping, Business Service development, respectively). Here's the unfortunately only slightly more readable version...

Enterprise Architecture and Business Rules - Marshall Edgison, ELM

Introduced last year, IDS' partnership with Corticon to embed Business Rules Management directly into ARIS was in full view in this session. This will be an area that will only get bigger as the Business Rules Management domain becomes more formalized and integrated with process modeling.

Business Processes: The Basis for Linking BPM and SOA – Dr. Wolfram Jost, IDS-Scheer VP

ARIS ProcessWorld 2007 Day 2 opened with, so far, the best presentation of the conference, something that would resonate with both Business and IT leaders wanting to understand where BPM fits in the enterprise and also the roadmap for ARIS through 2007.

(You can mouse over the slides to get a Pause button. You can also click on any picture to that photo's Flickr page and get a higher-res version. Props to Paul Stamatiou's Howto Embed Flickr Slideshow.)

Some notes...

Havana Nights - ARIS ProcessWorld 2007 Event

The main evening event of the conference was a dinner, music, casino night party hosted by IDS-Scheer in the Grand Pavillion at the Amelia Island Plantation and it was called Havana Nights. Cuban food was server, with whole Red Snapper that was very good. Everyone had a great night eating, drinking and playing after a energizing day of talk about something near and dear to all of us in attendance.

The casino crowds...

The Havana Nights band...

Innovation Through Open BPM with SOA - Dr. Mathias Kirchmer

The leader of IDS-Scheer Americas gave a keynote on aspects of Innovation and how BPM can be an enabler.

BPX (Business Process eXpert) Community

Personnally, the BPX (Business Process eXpert) Community, hosted as a part of the SAP Developers Network, has some exciting potential as a hub for ARIS practitioners to gather and share information about the platform. Community Evangelist Marilyn Pratt did a good job of explaining the community and how it is evolving. I was able to chat with her a bit afterwards and will find some ways to integrate my blogging with the community and start reading what others write. It will be interesting to see if the focus stays on ARIS for SAP Netweaver or can support a general ARIS community.

Some notes...

A Holistic Approach to the Service-Oriented Architecture - HP's Giovanni Del-Grosso

While making sure we knew that HP could help us all get there, Giovanni offered up some verify good information that could be used for a Maturity Model for SOA, describing some of the different aspects and facets that an enterprise should be looking at as they move forward. They also offer a turn-key set-up with ARIS for SAP Netweaver and facilities to try it out. Cool.

SAIC's Change Management and System Engineering Approach to a Financial Systems Renewal Project - Marc Kase, SAIC - Hoo Ray!!

Marc did a great job and we received lots of questions during and after the session. Lots of people anxious to get working on ARIS.

Engineering The Process-Centric Enterprise - Molson-Coors

It's hard to resist a session that combines a couple of my passions, Business Process Management and Beer, especially when I know that the folks at Molson-Coors know what they are doing (they won one of the 2007 BPE Verve Awards last night).

Here's a nice slide of the overall Business Architecture, showing Leadership (Strategy) processes at the top, Support processes (Finance, HR, IT) at the foundation level, and Core Business Processes right in the middle. Excellent!

Some notes...

Initial:
• Design Methods, Trained consultants and process stewards
Third Wave:
• Change Initiatives Department (Process, Change, and PM)
• BPM Governance – Business architects
• Investment in strategic BPM roadmap –

BPM - Embraced as a complimentary discipline to how organizations run the business.

Governance:
• Value Chains explicitly linked to strategic objectives.
• KPIs tied to Value Chains
• Councils analyze value chain performance
• Clearly defined roles and responsibilities for process ownership / controller accountabilities within the business assigned as part of people / HR processes.
Leadership:
• Communicating value proposition of Process throughout the organization.
• Most talented people embracing this.
• Reward performance against process metrics.
Expertise:
• An explicitly defined career path evident for BPM professional.
• BPM training.
• BPM methodology documented and published and meanaged by a central governance group.
Culture
• Enterprise process model as framework for measurement and decision making.
• Processes explicitly designed.
• Measure linked to corporate initiatives linked to process.

P6: Council Coors is involved in to help in BPM.

Process Architecture:
• Lead – Strategic planning
• Core Business Processes (picture): Innovate, Grow, Deliver. With stoplights even at this high level.
o ‘Grow’ tied to Global Marketing and Sales Information Systems project.
o Other projects tied to these value chain / core processes
 Start education with those that are leaders for these projects, not at the bottom.
• Support – Fin, HR, IT
o WINS: a project tied to the Support area (Finance, HR, IT)
o Value chain developed for core process areas and include KPIs and Strategic Objective linkage.

Culture: you have to drive people to use the processes. Corporate operational philosophy.

What are some of the metrics that are used to measure this change initiative department?
o Portfolio ROI – 328%.
o Adherence to forecast and schedules.
o VO: Seems very program management oriented, and didn’t get a really good answer on more BPM-related metrics.

What Really New With BPM? Gartner's Jim Sinur and Michael Blechar

Tag-team keynote from Gartner's best in the BPM, SOA, and other domain's. Jim has been the vanguard, but is turning at least some of the reigns over to Michael.

Levels of BPM maturity:

1. Acknowledge Operational Inefficiencies.
   
2. Process Aware
   
3. Intraprocess Automation and Control. A few departments.
   
4. Interprocess Automation and Control – Value Chains
   
5. Enterprise Valuation Control. Goals driving the process innovation.
   
6. Agile Business Structure.

Assigning Responsibilities To Business and IT (and Both): (Picture)

• Are your business people doing these things?
  
• Business Analysts can use the Business responsibilities as a set of services that can be offered to the current business SMEs.
  
• Gartner: Most of the Business Analysts are still coming from IT.
  
• The more SOA is implemented, with customer consumable services, the more business people will be able to configure their own processes and applications. Not there yet.

BPM Suites (slide) -

More pictures from this fantastic look at BPM in the set...click the above picture to get there.

Posted by outlawv at 07:47 AM | Comments (0)

Achieving Open BPM with SOA

As he did last year, IDS-Scheer Founder and CEO August Wilhelm Scheer used his own Jazz combo to illustrate the agility and collaboration that BPM promises. He opened with Cedar Walton's "Bolivia" and concluded with Miles' "Milestones"

ProcessWorld 2007 - The Flickr Photo Set

I've started the ARIS ProcessWorld 2007 Photo Set on Flickr to capture the sights of the February 7 - 9, 2007 conference on the Amelia Island Plantation near Jacksonville, Florida.

Here's one of the great slides I captured from a presentation from Gartner's leaders in the BPM / SOA space, Jim Sinur and Michael Blechar, detailing the responsibiltiies that both the business (mainly in the form of business analysts) and IT should have when instituting BPM and SOA. As process owners and users (and I'm one too...for Business Process Modeling), we should be looking to improve our abilities to handle those responsibilities...

Here's a link to the bigger, more readable version of this slide.

Lots more slide captures and pictures from the conference in the set.