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brenda michelson's technology advisory practice

Next for EA2010? Exploring the Business of Successful Enterprise Architecture Practices

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The BPM/SOA Community of Practice’s EA2010 Group is returning to the discussion forum.  Starting next week, EA2010 will pursue a new line of discussion and research focusing on the business aspects of successful enterprise architecture practices.  Items for discussion include:

  • Establishing and sustaining credibility with business and IT constituents
  • Business Outcome rather than Business Model alignment
  • Injecting financial measurement and decision-making acumen into EA
  • Catalyzing a business architecture practice

All members of the BPM/SOA Community of Practice are welcome to participate in the EA2010 Working Group.  For more information, see the EA2010 working group page.

Did you miss the group’s prior work?  Last year, the EA2010 team pursued a line of discussion and research on the purpose, practices and realities of expanding, or in some cases starting, business architecture practices.  This work stream culminated in the publication of an EA2010 Business Architecture whitepaper. 

And yes, the BPM/SOA Community of Practice is the renamed, post-merger, combination of the SOA Consortium and BPM Consortium.

 

[Disclosure: The BPM/SOA Community of Practice is a client of my firm, Elemental Links.]

Announcing 2010 Case Study Contest: Business Agility and Process Optimization enabled by BPM & SOA

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The BPM/SOA Community of Practice (CoP), in partnership with BPTrends and TechTarget, is sponsoring the “Business Agility and Process Optimization enabled by Business Process Management (BPM) and Service Oriented Architecture (SOA)” Case Study Competition. The competition is open to organizations of all sizes, including government agencies, which have successfully delivered business or mission value using a BPM, SOA or combined BPM-SOA approach.

Similar to the SOA Consortium’s contests in 2008 -  2009, the goal of the BPM/SOA Case Study Competition is to highlight business success stories and lessons learned to provide proof points and insights for other organizations considering or pursuing BPM, SOA or combined BPM-SOA adoption. To qualify for the competition, the project must be complete with demonstrated business results.

Entries will be judged on the complexity of the business problem addressed, the ROI/Business Value achieved (Agility/Innovation/Flexibility/Optimization/Resilience/Service Delivery), the level and sophistication of the cross-organizational collaboration (Business/Technical) and the usage of BPM/SOA approaches and supporting technology. In addition to one overall winner, organizations will be recognized by industry/government.

Case Study Competition winners will be announced at the BPM/SOA CoP meeting in Cambridge MA on September 21, 2010 and will be featured on the BPM/SOA CoP website and in October publications by BPTrends and TechTarget.

Visit the contest homepage to learn about the guidelines, peak at the application, and meet the judges.  Submissions will be accepted through June 29, 2010.

 

[Disclosure: The BPM/SOA Community of Practice is a client of my firm, Elemental Links.]

Counterintuitive: Creative Agency + ISO 9000 = Creativity Increase

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The Van Halen brown M&M anecdote wasn’t the only interesting piece in the March issue of Fast Company.  I also found a good example of "optimization for innovation”, which I first wrote about on the Business Ecology Initiative blog.  The article, entitled Partners in Time, describes how Partners & Napier, a Rochester, NY based creative agency, streamlined its processes at the request of Kodak, resulting in increased productivity, billings and creative time for the agency, as well as cost savings for its clients. 

How did they do this?  By mapping out processes, to identify and remove wasteful steps and interactions.  According to the article, Partners went “all in, applying for and earning certification in ISO 9000, a quality-management system akin to Six Sigma that’s normally used by manufacturing companies.”

Initially, the idea of applying process rigor to a creative business was met with skepticism:

"A creative embracing quality management may be unusual, but it also may be the model for how to handle clients’ increasingly stringent ROI demands.  When Kodak first asked us to do this, people worried that no one understood how long it takes to get to a great idea," concedes Partners’ CEO Sharon Napier. Chief creative officer Jeff Gabel says the opposite has happened. More often than not, Gabel says, creative work resembles a "giant hair ball." And that’s fine with him. "You don’t want to straighten it out," he says. "It’s nonlinear, illogical, and often occurs at unpredictable hours." But, he says, if the time allotted to a project could be rejiggered so more time went to creating great ideas — and less against the job’s ancillary grunt work — then he was game to try.”

The certification process and initial results:

“The certification process took six months and required each step of an assignment, from developing a brief to reviewing final work with the client, to be documented. It cost roughly $20,000 out of Partners’ pocket, but it revealed some surprising inefficiencies, including a lot of time wasted in back-and-forths for approvals of briefs, concepts, ideas, and directors. Partners was able to trim the time on a job from eight weeks to three, save the client approximately 40%, and boost productivity by 3.5%.”

The on-going impact:

“…its creative output seems to have blossomed as a result, as the agency is increasingly turning out higher-quality work, it says, in significantly less time.”

“Partners has been so happy with the results that it now uses the same approach with other clients. It’s winning more business because it can jump on opportunities once dismissed due to time constraints. Its billings have grown 300% in the past five years.

Still, the process is not without its flaws. All that hyper-efficiency can be exhausting, Gabel admits: "You’ve removed your slop factor."”

As you consider optimization opportunities in your organization, don’t limit yourself to traditional operational areas and boundaries.  Nor, fall victim to the “optimization = automation trap”.  Think about your creative types, strategists, and knowledge workers.  How can their work time be “rejiggered” to focus on value creation activities?

 

[Disclosure: Cross-posted from the Business Ecology Initiative (BEI) blog.  The BEI is a client of my firm, Elemental Links.]

Force.com + Visual Process Manager = Vanilla Layer Cake Theory

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Salesforce.com just added a powerful new tool to its Force.com development platform, a Visual Process Manager:

“The Visual Process Manager brings the power of Cloud Computing to Business Process Apps. Now you can visually draw any business process and instantly deploy it in the cloud with no code, no software and no infrastructure.  The Visual Process Manager helps companies easily automate specific business process like call center scripting, sales quotes, and new employee on boarding.” 

According to a post on TechCrunch:

“The technology powering the Visual Process Manager is based on technology acquired from Informavores, call scripting startup Salesforce bought last year.

The Manager has several different components. The Process Designer essentially helps businesses sketch out applications with established set forms, questions, and choices, and logic components, like task assignments, decision trees, and approval processes. These components can be dragged and dropped into a visual process design diagram/ The Process Wizard Builder enables companies to design a “wizard” to help walk end-users, step-by-step, through their business process. The Process Simulator lets customers test out and review processes before they are deployed. And lastly, the real-time process engine will run all of a company’s sophisticated processes and provides realtime scalability.”

The Visual Process Manager introduction gets a bit deeper on functionality.  [emphasis is mine]:

“Using our cloud-based workflow software solution, you can specify the retrieval, creation, update, or deletion of any object in a salesforce.com application or any Force.com object (including custom objects). You can also call any Force.com API. In practice, this functionality means that sales and service agents can work with simple, easy-to-follow scripts—while underneath, embedded business rules and salesforce.com data drive what the agent sees and automatically update CRM records. These are textbook examples of successful workflow software applications.

After you’ve optimized a specific process using the Visual Process Manager workflow software tool and the process is running inside your salesforce.com application, operations become much more efficient. The newly automated workflow carries out all the administration work behind the scenes. It may control the interaction of an agent in a call center or a customer on a Web site, as it silently interacts with other systems, processes, and Web services to deliver the required actions.

Because our workflow software tool is designed with integration in mind, you can link to databases, dialers, and IVRs; initiate workflows; control exceptional events or surge conditions; and handle the “stop and save” process required to manage escalations and call transfers. All in all, our workflow software frees sales reps and support agents from administrative grunt work, quickly giving them the situation-specific information they need for effective selling and top-notch customer service.”

As I read about Visual Process Manager, I was reminded of my Vanilla Layer Cake Theory paper from 2005. 

“There are classic rules of thumb used in buy/build decisions. Buy in situations of parity. Build for competitive advantage/differentiation. In a buy scenario, you willingly cede control of the end product (functionality, architecture, technology) for the promise of a lower price tag, ease of implementation, and quicker time to market. For success, you must actually cede that control—in other words, no modifications. But, that’s not always realistic. So, how can you reap the advantages of a buy, while providing a solution that actually fits your business (modifications and extensions), without getting trapped? Think Vanilla Layer Cake.”

An excerpt published on elemental links, November 2005:

“The vanilla layer cake theory is simple. Do vanilla (out-of-the-box) installations of all new application packages. Then, customize and extend the application functionality using abstraction layers, rather than in the application package itself.

[Click on picture to enlarge]

 

In essence, the application package installation performs the role of a provider in a service-oriented architecture. In some ways, the application package is more valuable for its building blocks, than how the vendor assembled it.

The abstraction layers implement your business architecture, in the form of an enterprise information model, business services, business scenario composition (process, events, service orchestration), and user interaction (portal, user interface, unified in-box).”

Of course in the SaaS world of Salesforce and Force.com, you can skip the “Do vanilla (out-of-the-box) installations of all new application packages” step, and proceed right to “customize and extend the application functionality using abstraction layers”.  Now, that’s intriguing… 

For those with a sense of nostalgia, you can read the entire Vanilla Layer Cake Theory on ebizQ.  Otherwise, dig in at Salesforce.com.

 

[Cross-posted from Elemental Cloud Computing].

BPM and SOA: Connected for Business Optimization

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Ok, I admit, the only person who thought I wouldn’t be continuing, in some capacity, with the merged BPM / SOA Consortium was me.  Apparently, I was wrong.  In addition to writing and advocacy for OMG’s Business Ecology Initiative, I have a new consulting relationship with the practice area communities, including the BPM / SOA-C, and two more to be announced.  [Here’s a hint on one.  As if I could say no!]

Anyway, moving on topic.  Since January, the BPM and SOA Consortiums have been working together to formalize the merged consortium’s mission, goals and objectives, identify some early projects, plan the March Symposium, and combine web properties. 

The results of that work, cross-posted from the newly combined (and spiffed up) BPM / SOA Consortium Insights, follow.

Who is the BPM / SOA Consortium? 

The BPM / SOA Consortium is an advocacy group comprised of practitioners, service providers and technology vendors dedicated to promoting the business value, and enabling the successful adoption, of Business Process Management (BPM) and Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) by the Global 1000, major government agencies and midmarket businesses.

The BPM / SOA Consortium is a practice area community under the Business EcologyTM Initiative (BEI).  BEI provides education, advocacy and member programs to enable organizations to achieve Business Ecology success, employ Actionable ArchitectureTM, and carve a path to business-IT integration.

Business Ecology is a business-technology imperative focused on streamlining business processes, removing waste from technology portfolios, and adjusting resource consumption, to optimize business operations and foster business innovation.

The BPM / SOA Consortium is a newly expanded community, connecting the members and sponsors of the SOA and BPM Consortiums, to focus on business optimization.

Why did the BPM & SOA Consortiums merge?

The 2010 merger of the SOA and BPM Consortiums is based on the following premises:

  • When the SOA Consortium began, Service Oriented Architecture was more of a fringe methodology that only a few organizations were doing with any great success, rather than an accepted part of an overall business strategy. Three years later, corporations large and small use the principles of SOA to enhance their overall business and technology strategies.
  • A well-implemented Service Oriented Architecture leads to streamlined technology portfolios, improved resource sharing, better defined business capabilities, and ease of capability introduction or change.
  • A well-implemented Business Process Management initiative leads to greater business agility, faster productivity and improved customer interactions for all stakeholders.
  • The combined use of Service Oriented Architecture and Business Process Management results in an optimized business environment that is change-friendly, and poised for business innovation.
  • Business and information technology professionals must collaborate to realize the highest yielding benefits of Business Process Management and Service Oriented Architecture.
  • Enterprise and government practitioners would benefit greatly from a vibrant practitioner community to exchange insights on use cases, challenges and techniques, related to Service Oriented Architecture and Business Process Management, used individually, or combined.
  • Business Process Management and Service Oriented Architecture, individually and combined, enable Business Ecology.

And now, the go forward organization.

BPM / SOA Consortium Mission

Promote the value and adoption of Business Process Management and Service Oriented Architecture as a means for organizations to optimize business operations, increase agility and streamline portfolios.

BPM / SOA Consortium Goals

The BPM / SOA Consortium is working to achieve the following goals by 2013, that:

  • 75% of the Global 1000 and 50% of mid-sized businesses combine Business Process Management and Service Oriented Architecture to optimize business operations, streamline portfolios, and create a change-friendly business-technology environment.
  • 75% of Major Government Agencies combine Business Process Management and Service Oriented Architecture to optimize mission operations, streamline portfolios, and create a change-friendly business-technology environment.

BPM / SOA Consortium Objectives:

  • Shift the conversation from competing strategies to combined business value (business optimization)
  • Provide education on business analysis, process design, governance, performance measurement and implementation techniques to combine Service Oriented Architecture and Business Process Management for business optimization
  • Showcase Business Process Management and Service Oriented Architecture success stories, benefit realization, best practices and lessons learned
  • Raise the Business IQ of information technology professionals and Tech-Savvy of business professionals to realize the greatest business value from Business Process Management, Service Oriented Architecture and business-technology
  • Create a vibrant practitioner community for the exchange of insights on use cases, challenges and techniques, which will assist in value attainment, and spur broader, industry-wide Service Oriented Architecture and Business Process Management adoption.

Visit our website to learn about BPM / SOA Consortium membership and sponsorship.  Check out the agenda for our upcoming public symposium in Jacksonville Florida.

 

[Disclosure: OMG, via its Business Ecology Initiative and practice area consortia, is a client of my firm, Elemental Links]

Brenda M. Michelson

Brenda Michelson

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