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

AIM Pro Outlook Integration - 3:00 PM Record Time

AIM Pro Outlook Integration - 3:00 PM Record Time
Originally uploaded by Vince Outlaw.

Immediately after installing AIM Pro and launching it, with nothing else open (important geek fact), I was reminded that at 3 pm, I should Record Time...something that only Outlook (and an interesting Google Personalized Widget...screen shot needed) has been able to show me. This is some interesting integration...now can I subscribe to some other calendars?

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...

Process of Process Management: Process Strategy, Design, Implementation, Controlling.

Business Business Process Management: Confusing? Yes. Differentiation from Technical BPM (the implementation platform). This is the same with any process, there is a process definition and an implementation of it.

ARIS Value Engineering � Pre-packaged solution: EA, Process-driven SAP, Governance, Enterprise BPM.

Software Architecture Are Changing � Recent history, including Enterprise Services, the current state.

BPM, Management Discipline: Continuous improvement in productivity and innovation.
and SOA, Architectural Style: Support changes in productivity and innovation with increased flexibility.

BPChange Events: New Processes, Departments, KPI�s, Process Flows, Business Functions, Responsibilities. This is a good set of events that would initiate events in a BPM discipline.

Granularity of Business Services (slide): Excellent example of a decomposition that business people might be able to understand and begin to adapt to their own processes.

ARIS SOA Designer � Supporting the Business Service Definition and Design (Modeling) function.

SOA Objectives: Flexible IT systems, Flexible Business Processes, Biz-IT Alignment, Revenue / Profit growth.

The Big Picture (slide)

Organizations are moving toward process-orientation, so the software vendors are also. If the organization doesn�t change, you will have trouble implementing the vendor processes (or will do so in a functional silo way).

Visibility of ARIS PPM (slide): To really model As-Is, you should use something that automatically generates it from the actual execution of the process (like ARIS PPM).

ARIS Roadmap 2007 (slide).

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.

Types of Innovation: Business Model and Technology.

Open BPM addresses both of these. Open BPM places for Innovation: EA, SOA, Change Management, Process Controlling.

Value Chain Evolution (VCE) Innovation Theory: Outsource / In-House decisions should be made with focus on Customer Requirements / Acceptance. In-House those things your customer cares about most.

Resources, Process, and Values (PRV) Innovation Theory: Combination of these factors cause disruptive innovation. Agile companies embrace disruption in these areas.

Open BPM is an innovation itself (in the application space) and an enabler of innovation (in business areas that utilize BPM in order to design, simulate, quickly tie services)

NOVA EA Structure: Executive Process owners, Process Leaders, Process Owners.

Innovation - Part of Daily Business - Innovation Process Example...

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...

Differentiator from SAP Developer Network (SDN)
� SDN for the programmers, developers, repository keepers.
� BPX for the Composers who are building and orchestrating the services and Disruptive innovators who are working on big improvements in the whole business / IT interface.

BPX role coming from BPAnalyst, App Consultant, Process Developer, BPArchitect, BPManager.

BPX Community: Both traditional content: white papers, articles, etc., organized by Business Process Cycle (Analyze, Design, Implement, etc.)

Informal Content: forum, wiki, blog.

Assured they are not focused on SAP solutions only, but are domain subject matter.

Are the bloggers all SAP employee�s?

Are there measurements that they are using for the contributors to BPX?

Is there content (or plans for content) focused on ARIS users? There is some content now, but it looks to be focused on the SAP for Netweaver tool.

Do they have the traditional content available for subscription?

Do they accommodate contributors who may already have blogs or content from other communities? Support for trackback and such.

Is there any relationship between ARIS user community and BPX?

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.

Users are looking to compose new services (processes) on the fly. The user experience part of the Business Process Platform.

They note BPM as a desire from the Business, but most of the BPM initiatives come from the IT side of the house right now.

Michael will be doing the BPModeling Gartner Quadrant chart from now on. Jim�s done it since 1995.

BPM is a management practice that provides for governance of a business process environment toward the goal of improving agility and operational performance.

BPM is a structured approach.

BPM rewards timeline: Productivity (2005), Visibility (2012), and Innovation (2017)

30% of Fortune 500 doing detailed modeling of 30% of their applications. Many are starting at the bottom (measurement) and move up to business process modeling.

Levels of BPM maturity:

Acknowledge Operational Inefficiencies.
Process Aware
Intraprocess Automation and Control. A few departments.
Interprocess Automation and Control � Value Chains
Enterprise Valuation Control. Goals driving the process innovation.
Agile Business Structure.

Critical Success Factors

Strategic Alignment
Culture and Leadership
People � Enhancing (and, VO, archiving) process-related expertise and knowledge.
Governance � Multiple levels: Process, Service.
Methods � Approaches and techniques, Six Sigma, SDLCs. Missing: One methodology to follow, so must use a toolbox approach.
Information Technology �

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.

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"

Re-emphasis on ARIS's place in the BPM stack, not to include the implementation platforms, such as BEA ALBPM and SAP Netweaver.

Introduction of the ARIS Meta2-Repository (Meta-squared), a metamodel for the business objects needed to describe and implement Business Process Management. I heard talk in the sessions that this might promise to open up the ARIS database to more easy reporting and usage...which would be a plus.

Here's an excellent slide showing the different aspects of a business activity, highlighting the KPI at the top...how are you measuring the work you do...how does your manager measure your performance...KPIs are the place to start...

More slides are in the set...you can get to them (and larger versions of the slides) by clicking on any picture here.

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.

ProcessWorld 2007 Opens With Jazz

The 2007 version of IDS-Scheer's ProcessWorld opened this morning with a keynote by CEO and founder August Wilhelm Scheer focusing on Open BPM, emphasizing the ARIS product being open to all business models, business process standards, and vendor BPM implementation platforms.

In the tradition, Professor Scheer had his Jazz combo on stage to illustrate agility in business process as related to collaboration of a Jazz band. Here's a snippet of their work on Miles Davis' "Milestones"...

IDS Scheer Partners with Systar to Launch New Process Event Monitoring Solution

IDS Scheer, the leading provider of solutions for business process excellence, today announced a partnership agreement with Systar (Euronext Paris: SAR) (ISIN: FR0000052854), the leading provider of Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) solutions. Under the agreement, IDS Scheer will embed Systar’s core technology to provide customers with real-time business event monitoring. The new offering, ARIS Process Event Monitor, will provide companies with real-time monitoring to manage exceptions and risks within business processes.

ARIS Process Event Monitor will provide current process-relevant information and enable companies to react immediately to critical events. Rule-based alerts, notifications and actions intelligently identify critical situations based on automated tracking of on-going processes fed by sophisticated adapters that capture, filter and aggregate events.

This won't be 'unveiled' until March 2007 at the CeBIT conference...maybe we'll get a sneak-peak at ProcessWorld in February.