More on Think Tank
My previous post just hit the low points. Sandy has a more complete writeup of the day's activities, which is mostly accurate. Kinda long, though, Sandy. Didn't have time to fin
Mom-Blogging
No I don't mean moblogging. More like "even my 79-year old Mom is into blogging." Not about BPM (that would be scary), but the more invigorating throw-da-bums-out-in-Washington variety. So over the weekend we both went to the YearlyKos convention in Las Vegas, where 1000 of the top political bloggers and their subscribers -- along with a surprising number of big-name politicians trying to grab onto the "netroots" wave -- got together face-to-face in a bunch of panels, workshops, and general socializing.
New Poll on BPM Portals
I've been focusing a lot of my publishing and marketing -- monthly column, 2006 BPMS Report, BPMS training -- in the past year through BPM Institute, which is owned by Brainstorm, the conference group, and now I'm thinking about next year. Which BPM portal do you think has the widest reach, most interesting stuff, is best to deal with, etc? Take a minute to vote in the poll in the blog home page sidebar.
The Phony "War" Between BPM and SOA
Derek Miers called my attention over the weekend to two posts from the SOA blogosphere suggesting "bad blood" between BPM and SOA, framing it as the latest proxy war in an age-old struggle between business and IT. I suppose Derek, who doesn't blog himself (yet), wanted me to point out how ridiculous this is (or at least embarrass myself trying). Anyway, I'm taking the bait.
The original cherry bomb was thrown by Christoper Koch in CIO Magazine's blog, who described BPM vs SOA as "a new front developing in the war between business and IT," and Joe McKendrick on ZDNet quickly poured gasoline on the flames. Koch tries to set himself above the fray but tips his hand by centering the discussion on business's frustration with IT's lack of agility and concluding that SOA is more likely to foster agility than anything he sees from the BPM camp. Thus, like most discussions of BPM from the SOA world, he gets a few facts right but generally misses the point.
Agility is important, and SOA is all about agility, but agility is really IT's concern and not the central focus of business executives, nor is dealing with change the key objective of BPM. Better aligning processes with business goals; making processes faster, more efficient, and more reliably compliant with policies and best practices; making business performance more visible even when the process crosses organizational or system boundaries, and more actionable in real time... these are just as important as agility to business.
Think Tank Presos Available
Also summaries of the roundtables. Check out this from OMG.
Another View on BPEL4People
Richard Brown, an IBMer from across the pond, blogged recently about BPEL4People and took issue with my contention that it was too grandiose and after-the-fact to achieve wide adoption as a standard. He tracked back to my original post in February, saying I'm increasingly of the opinion that standardisation often occurs too soon and that major revisions are a reflection that the initial specs fail to anticipate potential problems or extended use cases.
BPM as Anti-Pattern
As if we needed more evidence that BPM and SOA are uneasy allies, one of Steve Jones's SOA Anti-Patterns, widely praised in the blogs for their hilarious wit and insight, seems to me a perfect example of how some architects still view BPM's top-down approach as worst practice, not best. The "percolating process" anti-pattern is described this way:
Architecture for Dummies
Normally when the Ayn Rand references start flying, I head for cover. But since Phil Gilbert's rant on the futility of foisting an SOA primer on naive business managers tracked back to my post on what BPM on SOA would look like, I guess I'm obligated to say something. Phil's nominal beef is with the mere idea of a book called SOA for Dummies, which commits the sin (in his eyes) of equating SOA with web services and ESBs. The deeper issue, however, seems to be misappropriation by the SOA community of a value proposition that really belongs to something called Business Architecture, things like business-IT alignment, agility, reuse, etc. Business architecture, from his description of it, looks at business and IT together as an "organic" whole (with a slight top-down business-oriented perspective), rather than starting with IT infrastructure and then seeing what you can build on it.
So I guess he's sort of agreeing with my post (I can't tell), where I noted the inherent dissonance between BPM (top-down, business-driven) and SOA (bottom-up, IT infrastructure-driven). But he thinks that trying to explain technology to the business is a misguided approach:
On a Reference Model for BPM 2.0
Ismael posts an interesting reader request on IT|Redux addressed, it seems, to both of us:
Ismael, Bruce:
Do you think maybe it?s time for experts such as yourselves to get together and establish a standard model for BPM 2.0 in simple, concise and hopefuly universally applicable terms that can be ported throughout various functions and industries?
My work is in the supply chain arena, where about 10-15 years ago there was a similar debate regarding what constitutes a supply chain, which business function was responsible for what portion of the chain, what were some characteristics unique to the supply chain, but standard enough that could be used across all industries, etc? you get my point.
BPMS Watch Is Six Months Old
Today is the half-year anniversary of BPMS Watch, time to reflect on how it's gone, and where to go next.