On IT-business alignment, and related things

If you want our take on where Oracle's taking BEA...

noreply@blogger.com (Neil Ward-Dutton) — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 20:25:00 +0000

Read this new report.

I know we're not the quickest off the mark, but we wanted to get the whole team working together to author something comprehensive, and with travel and so on, that took a few days.

We'll admit to being pessimistic about BEA's prognosis going into the Oracle acquisition, but Oracle's early communications highlight its understanding of the strengths of the BEA technology, as well as of BEA's market footprint. What's more, the company is also openly committing to support BEA customers' existing working relationships and arrangements, and has pledged not to force product migration on any customer. There is more that Oracle needs to do, of course, but this is a good start.

New Collaboration Service Launch!

noreply@blogger.com (Angela Ashenden) — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 12:10:00 +0000

We are delighted to announce the launch of our second Continuous Advisory Service (CAS), which focuses on collaboration. Following the same format as our BPM Continuous Advisory Service (introduced in May), the Collaboration service offers a combination of in-depth reports, an interactive online vendor comparison tool, and optional analyst access relating to topics covered within the service.

The service launch sees the publication of our first Strategic Insight report, which examines the relationship between collaboration and knowledge management, and our first Market Insight report, which assesses the value of consumer social networking standards such as OpenSocial within the enterprise.

In parallel with the new premium service, we have published four new reports into our free "Guest pass" research library: two reports which outline our approach to assessing collaboration software, and two new Vendor Capability Assessments (VCA) which focus on the collaboration software portfolios of Microsoft and IBM respectively.

If you want to have a look at the Collaboration Continuous Advisory Service for yourself, we're offering free, no-obligation trials that run for 7 days. You can register for a trial here.

Links for 2008-07-04 [del.icio.us]

noreply@blogger.com (Neil Ward-Dutton) — Fri, 04 Jul 2008 21:11:00 +0000

Salesforce chief brags of cloud for grown-ups | The Register
Hmm, I think it's time we really dug into how viable Force.com is as a platform for enterprise software development
Why OpenID leads to Information Cards
Kim Cameron explains how Information Cards can secure OpenID authentication to prevent phishing attacks.
Information Card Foundation launched
CNET covers the announcement of the Identity Card Foundation, which sets out to provide the guidance and support to facilitate broader adoption of Information Cards. Members include Microsoft, Liberty Alliance, Oracle, Novell, Ping, Arcot

Collaborative mind mapping

noreply@blogger.com (Angela Ashenden) — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 10:55:00 +0000

I don't usually blog about individual briefings from vendors, but I've just had a fascinating briefing from Mindjet, a company which has developed an interactive, collaborative mind mapping solution based on its established personal mind mapping technology. Mindjet Connect allows multiple users to synchronously edit a central mind map, seeing what each other is editing in real time while maintaining full versioning and rollback, and combining this with communications-centric collaboration capabilities such as group chat, video conferencing, whiteboarding and desktop sharing. With almost 20 years of engineering and market experience, Mindjet should be in a good position to recognise the potential of its core solution, but what I think is interesting is that the company has created a slick, powerful and flexible collaborative application which sets a standard for many of the current new wave of collaboration software vendors. Where many talk about the power and innovation of wikis, I think the new Mindjet Connect solution competes very favourably in this space. I'll be writing an On The Radar report on Mindjet soon.

A comprehensive analysis of IBM's BPM Suite

noreply@blogger.com (Neil Ward-Dutton) — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 13:41:00 +0000

After months of tweaking and review, our coverage of IBM's BPM technology offering is now live. It joins our coverage of Appian, BEA (we're keeping an eye on this, of course, and will update it as soon as is practical), Lombardi, Software AG and TIBCO.

We've been working on this assessment since the autumn of 2007: the delay is mostly due to the breadth of IBM's portfolio (the assessment report runs to 33 pages, whereas most of the others come in around 20 pages) - combined with the fact that, just as we were about to finalise the report, IBM changed its portfolio positioning, introducing the BPM Suite. Anyhow the effort has been worth it - we think the result is pretty comprehensive and definitely worth reading if you're in the process of selecting a BPM technology vendor.

The IBM BPM assessment report is available as part of our Guest Pass library, here; the detailed comparative scoring information, which you can personalise in line with your preferences and constraints, lives in the online vendor comparison tool that's part of our BPM continuous advisory service. Although this service isn't free, you can get a 7-day free trial, so you can use the tool now to see how IBM stacks up in the context of your own environment and preferences - just fill in this form.

Next up is Pegasystems - the assessment process is already underway.

Compuware "2.0" - passion or mis-step?

noreply@blogger.com (Neil Ward-Dutton) — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 22:15:00 +0000

Just to let you know that as well as publishing two new BPM reports in the last couple of days, we've got another new report in our library too.

Our new analyst guru Bola Rotibi just finalised her second MWD report, looking at Compuware's recent "Compuware 2.0" relaunch. Is it a welcome display of passion from a company long known for hiding its light under a bushel, or a move that exposes further weaknesses?

Two new BPM reports

noreply@blogger.com (Neil Ward-Dutton) — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 21:53:00 +0000

We just published two new "On The Radar" reports on business process technology vendors in our open "Guest Pass" research library. Both vendors are taking an approach that's outside the mainstream, and both are focusing primarily on opportunities with small-to-medium businesses.

RunMyProcess provides a process design and deployment platform that's been designed up-front to be delivered through a software-as-a-service (SaaS) model - aimed at helping SMEs with commitments to investing in SaaS integrate their applications and augment them with hosted process flows. Colosa, on the other hand, offers an open-source BPM technology toolset, ProcessMaker, that's entirely written in PHP.

We hope you enjoy them! As always, you can access these reports with a free subscription (you can enrol here if you're not one of the 3,000 or so existing members).

Embarcadero rescues CodeGear

noreply@blogger.com (Neil Ward-Dutton) — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 22:39:00 +0000

In our most recent report, our new analyst Bola Rotibi looks at Embarcadero's recent acquisition of CodeGear (the Borland subsidiary that it's been trying to offload for many months) - and asks: has Embarcadero made a smart move or a stupid one, and what does it mean for organisations looking at investing in development tools?

You can download the report if you have access to our guest pass research: if you're not a member, it's easy - you can register for free.

IIAR Analyst of the Year survey

noreply@blogger.com (Neil Macehiter) — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 08:27:00 +0000

We were pleasantly surprised here at MWD by the results of a recent survey by the Institute of Industry Analyst Relations, which surveyed almost 120 analyst relations professionals (for those of you who aren't aware, these are the people that act as our interface with vendors) across the globe.

It won't come as a total shock that we came out of it rather well - why else would I be blogging about it:

Our most recent recruit, Bola Rotibi, was the number 8 analyst
MWD was similarly ranked in the analyst firm category on a global basis and was number 5 in EMEA
We were the number 5 software analyst firm
We came in at number 8 when it comes to relevance (and number 5 in EMEA)

We're particularly proud of that last one given this from Jonny Bentwood commenting on the results:

One of the interesting results from the survey is the distinction made between relevant and important analyst firms. From my perspective it appears that people made the recognised tier 1?s (Gartner, Forrester, IDC) as the most important as they realise that these companies have a strong impact on sales due to their customer base and research viability. However, relevant firms did not necessarily map on to these same firms and the ones ranked most highly tended to have a greater focus on bespoke advice (largely gained through inquiry time).

When we founded MWD back in February 2005 we set out to differentiate ourselves from the big analyst firms with a very open and flexible approach which allows us to offer tailored advice to our customers. It seems to be paying off.

Obviously, we're really chuffed with this recognition, particularly as it comes from a group of individuals whose job it is to work with analysts on a daily basis.

We're equally pleased that other independent analysts did so well, particularly our business partners over at Freeform Dynamics and RedMonk.

More BPM coverage, and our other blog(s)

noreply@blogger.com (Neil Ward-Dutton) — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 07:03:00 +0000

In my recent post highlighting our new line of services, I neglected to mention an important facet of our new BPM continuous advisory service, and the other services we're working on: each service has a companion blog.

The "service blog" allows our analyst teams to not only highlight new research in the service, upgrades, outages etc - but also highlight other research or information out there that's likely to be of interest to anyone working in the area of service coverage. The idea is to make each service blog a valuable resource in its own right.

Here's our new BPM service news blog. The latest post highlights the addition of coverage of BPM specialist supplier Appian.

In keeping with our philosophy, anyone can subscribe to the blog - it's not exclusively for our paid-for subscription customers. Anyone can access the Appian assessment, too - it's part of our "guest pass" research library that we're continuing to add to, even though we're now also offering paid-for subscription services. Just sign up for free and you can look at what we think of Appian's BPM offering, as well as checking out BEA, Lombardi, Software AG and TIBCO. If you're a paid-for subscription service licensee you'll get access to additional data that will help you compare these vendors side-by-side, in the context of your own environment and priorities - as well as gaining access to exclusive BPM research study findings, best-practice case studies, one-on-one analyst access, and more.

Of course, if you want to see how all this paid-for subscription stuff looks, you can sign up for a free trial of that, too... it's easy.

We'll be adding IBM to our BPM coverage in the coming week or two, and Pegasystems should follow in the next month. If you want to make sure you're up-to-date with what we're doing in BPM, just point your feed-reader here.

IBM's identity management becomes user-centric: HP's identity management exit strategy

noreply@blogger.com (Neil Macehiter) — Thu, 22 May 2008 07:54:00 +0000

Courtesy of InternetNews on Tuesday I learned that IBM has added support for OpenID, Windows CardSpace and Eclipse's Higgins Identity Framework to its Tivoli Federated Identity Manager (FIM) offering. As one of the enterprise identity management heavyweights, IBM's announcement is an important endorsement of user-centric identity approaches. Such approaches are still in the formative phase of the adoption curve, particularly in the enterprise, so I see this is an investment for the future for IBM. IBM's significant installed base should help to increase awareness, particularly for organisations supporting external user communities.

IBM's press release provides more details on the user-centric credentials (no pun intended!) of FIM. It also discusses the product's SOA Identity Service, which is designed to address some of the challenges associated with identity lifecycle management and audit where service-oriented approaches are applied to siloed applications with siloed security. These challenges are something I highlighted back in February 2006 and are a barrier to the realisation of the value of SOA as it moves out of project-level deployments. I see the SOA Identity Service as the more important aspect of this announcement, with SOA being a more pressing IT (and hopefully business) concern than user-centric identity.

As an aside, the InternetNews article mentions that the enterprise identity management market

is becoming increasingly competitive with offerings from HP, CA and Oracle.

Can't fault the journalist on CA and Oracle ... but HP! Earlier in the year the company announced that it was no longer going to be selling its Identity Center products to new customers: hardly a competitive force. As part of this (hopefully for its customers) graceful retreat from the market, HP announced that it has established an exclusive agreement with Novell whereby the two companies will

jointly offer migration services, HP will resell Novell identity and security management solutions and Novell will license HP Identity Center technology

When HP originally announced that it was exiting the market, it stated that it would continue to support and develop Identity Center for its existing customers so I was somewhat surprised to see it offering a migration programme. I wonder whether those customers didn't see this as an effective way forward for what is critical infrastructure. Whilst the programme was a surprise, the partner wasn't. Where else could HP have gone? BMC, CA or IBM: hardly, given the competition in the IT service/systems management markets (and numerous others in the case of IBM). Sun: difficult given competition in the hardware space. Oracle: would have made things difficult for HP's SAP alliance team. Microsoft: lacks the heterogeneous environment support and breadth of functionality that HP's customers need. So, whilst I am sure the sentiments behind Ben Horowitz's (VP and GM, Business Technology Optimization, Software, HP) statement that HP chose Novell

because of its outstanding set of technologies, recognized market leadership and tremendous commitment to working with HP customers

are real, the company didn't have too many others to chose from!

A "Start" button for a new phase of our business

noreply@blogger.com (Neil Ward-Dutton) — Tue, 20 May 2008 10:53:00 +0000

Here's a little snipped screenshot from the MWD website homepage, as it appears from today. That little green box above our main menu doesn't look like much, but it's a big deal for us - as of today, we're launching a completely new line of business that we expect to drive significant growth for us and hugely increase our ability to scale our business.

Over the past few months we've mentioned, in passing, the fact that we're developing some new services.

In mid-April we quietly published six Business Process Management (BPM)-focused reports into our free "guest pass" research library: two documents outlining our approach to BPM technology assessments, together with assessments of offerings from BEA, Lombardi, Software AG and TIBCO (you can find links to those on our homepage - under "highlights"). These assessments follow the tried-and-tested approach we've used to great effect in the past when looking at SOA infrastructure and identity management offerings, working from a common assessment framework that seeks to get under the covers of what's important.

The publication of these reports coincided with us launching a new BPM service to a small handful of our existing paying customers. After a couple of weeks of testing and tweaking, we're now finally ready to make a lot more noise about it.

Our new BPM Continuous Advisory Service builds on the foundation of our "guest pass" research mentioned above, but adds much more. There are three main elements:

A deeper set of "premium" research reports covering BPM strategy issues, case studies, findings from Europe-wide surveys (which we're conducting twice a year) looking at BPM adoption, maturity and best practice, and industry news and analysis. This base is continuously added to as we go.
An innovative online interactive vendor comparison tool which allows you to compare and rank vendor capabilities based on your specific business and IT requirements (is a rules capability particularly important to you? Is simulation not interesting? Is it imperative that you only consider vendors which support BPMN, or run on WebSphere? Specify your preferences in the tool and it will dynamically rank and filter vendors accordingly). Our guest pass assessment reports don't include comparative scoring; the tool does. All the vendors we cover in our guest pass research reports are included in the tool's database (and we're currently working on extending the list of vendors - watch this space).
An optional Analyst Access facility, giving direct access to our analysts so that you can engage with us on topics relating to the advisory service content.

The service is licensed on an annual subscription basis, and we're pursuing an "open licensing" policy, rather than working on the established model of charging per-seat. One license covers a customer for anyone, anywhere in the world, who wants to access the research and tools.

Sounds like a good deal, doesn't it?

If you work for a company looking at BPM technology or currently exploring a BPM initiative, you should check out how our service can help you to define your strategy, implementation approach, and technology procurement (particularly if you're based in Europe). More information about the service, together with pricing, is available here. And if you work for a supplier of IT products or services and want to get more of a handle on what's really going on in the world of BPM (again, particularly in Europe), you'll want to check out this information.

If you want to have a look at the service for yourself, we're also offering free, no-obligation trials that run for 7 days. You can register for a trial here.

In the coming weeks we'll be launching a new Continuous Advisory Service focused on Collaboration that is built from the same elements as the BPM service we're launching today. And over the coming months, you'll see us expanding our focus further. But all this new stuff doesn't mean the end of our commitment to delivering free research: we'll continue to make a whole raft of research, podcasts and blog posts available free of charge to our 1,500 (and growing) strong regular reader base.

Links for 2008-05-16 [del.icio.us]

noreply@blogger.com (Neil Ward-Dutton) — Sat, 17 May 2008 00:03:00 +0000

Compuware 2.0: We Make IT Rock
Compuware 2.0 - accompanied by a chugging "rawk" soundtrack and with a new COO. Part of the goal is to recruit bright young talent - but is this just like your Dad trying to look cool in a nightclub?

Links for 2008-05-14 [del.icio.us]

noreply@blogger.com (Neil Ward-Dutton) — Thu, 15 May 2008 00:04:00 +0000

Ning Chairman Marc Andreessen dings Google's Friend Connect | Outside the Lines - CNET News.com
Interesting - is online community something you should create with a product or mash-in as a feature? Something to ponder...

Links for 2008-05-13 [del.icio.us]

noreply@blogger.com (Neil Ward-Dutton) — Wed, 14 May 2008 00:04:00 +0000

United States Patent Application: 0080082465
A patent (which includes Bill Gates and Ray Ozzie amongs its inventors!) for an intelligent agent that monitors the environment, user characteristics and preferences to advise a user in "decision-making processes for efficiency or safety concerns"
itickr.com � Blog Archive � SignOn.com / Google Apps Integration
Ping adds support for SAML to signon.com (already supports OpenID and CardSpace) through integration with Ping Federate. Also supports Google apps
Dave and Vikas Hop on the Right Bus
Oracle's Clayton Donley explains how the Identity Governance Framework and, more specifically, CARML, to enable movement of data along an identity bus by providing a means for endpoints on the bus to understand the data being passed

Oracle makes its "enterprise 2.0" play

noreply@blogger.com (Neil Ward-Dutton) — Mon, 12 May 2008 21:18:00 +0000

Along with an assorted collection of other analysts and journalists, on Friday I sat down for a conversation with Charles Phillips. The invitation to came pretty much out of the blue a couple of weeks ago; the reason was because "Charles is interested in having a conversation about Web 2.0 trends in the enterprise, and outlining what Oracle's looking to do in that area".

The invite was interesting not only because Oracle's been pretty backward in coming forward about its collaboration story of late, and it sounded as if it might be preparing to say something new. It was also interesting because Oracle is renowned in analyst circles for being very structured and controlled in the way it engages with analyst firms. Whereas other vendors have long attempted to at least give the impression that they're interested in having conversations with analysts who have useful insights, no matter the size of firm they come from, Oracle has mostly stuck to its policy of only focusing on what it calls "tier 1" firms (Gartner, Forrester and IDC). I think MWD currently rates as a "tier 3" firm... so an invitation to a meeting with Oracle's President was pretty surprising. Still, as my Grandma always used to say, "never look a gift horse in the mouth"...

As it happens the briefing wasn't a hoax, and it was rather good. In the spirit of all things 2.0ey, Oracle has started to explore a kind of "market conversation" approach to talking about the work it's doing in the Enterprise 2.0 arena. Phillips was - for Oracle - close to being excitingly off-message at times. The assembled Oracleists also seemed to be genuinely interested in witnessing a conversation, rather than a prepared speech. Which was cool.

So anyway. There were four particular things of note that I took away from the conversation, all of which I think we'll be keen to track going forward:

Oracle is putting real muscle behind Enterprise 2.0. It's building a dedicated sales force, combining pre-sales, consulting, and education resources together along with feet on the street. It'll be selling consulting offerings, together with a set of underpinning technologies, all of which exist today - Oracle Portal, Oracle Universal Content Management, and WebCenter, together with the underlying Fusion Middleware pieces. It's building out a set of "use cases" based on some internal market research and will sell its offerings through those.

BEA's assets will be part of the picture. The Enterprise 2.0 sales initiative will bring in people,assets and resources from BEA. This is good news because it shows Oracle is looking at its acquisition of BEA not just from the standpoint of acquiring middleware market share.

Oracle is relaunching its collaboration offering. The new Oracle Beehive technology is being developed to sit alongside Oracle's existing technology stack as outlined above, and it's not escaped Oracle's attention that if it can make market inroads with an Enterprise 2.0 story, it has a potential follow-on opportunity to displace some of the (very large chunk of) enterprise spending that goes on "heritage" collaboration software product upgrades. The company's Collaboration Suite hardly set the world on fire back in 2002-05: this shows that Oracle is revving up to have another go. But avoiding taking the incumbents on head-on this time.

As well as building out a standalone proposition, Oracle is folding the technology into its other offerings and processes. Phillips talked about work going on to integrate the collaboration platform capabilities in Beehive together with its Fusion applications and its BPM technology offering. But it's also taking much of the technology and using that internally within Oracle - and as it learns about what works, it's infusing a number of its own business processes with an Enterprise 2.0 flavour. The Oracle Partner Network is one place where it's trying stuff out (with 9,000 Oracle products and 20,000 partners on the books, this could be viewed as Oracle's own long tail opportunity. Sidenote: Oracle has *9,000* products? Jeez. That's not good.)

As an interesting footnote for analyst-watchers: at the end of the meeting, the Oracleists said they were "very keen to continue the dialogue". This was fantastic news, given MWD's status with Oracle! But what was behind that? Had they had some kind of road-to-damascus experience about the value of smaller analyst firms? Well, no... it turns out that Oracle's PR team is interested in talking to me as a "blogger" - but this is something separate from my work as an analyst for MWD. MWD is still in the same position as an analyst firm, and it seems I'll need to have a separate relationship with Oracle as an analyst. I'll leave an analysis of what this might mean for how Oracle perceives the relative value of "bloggers" and "analysts" (particularly in light of discussions like this one about what defines an analyst) as an exercise to the interested reader.

It's funny, though: last time I looked, I was just one person... it seems that getting collaboration and conversation right is indeed not about introducing new technology, but about adjusting your culture and organisation.

A week of firsts

noreply@blogger.com (Bola Rotibi) — Mon, 12 May 2008 14:50:00 +0000

You might think having been a senior analyst for 8 years that I'd have seen most things. Well, this has definitely been a week of firsts for me.

My first ever JavaOne conference; my first week in joining MWD as a principal analyst covering the application delivery and lifecycle management market (moving from 8 years at Ovum) and finally my first blog entry.

I accepted Sun's invitation to JavaOne this year because rumour has it that interest in the conference and support for Java is waning, and I wanted to see for myself just what was going on.

To be honest, I've never given much credence to such hyperbolic scaremongering, and what I've seen over the last couple of days merely backed that up. There's no doubt that Java's progress has been and continues to be marked with difficulties: controlling interests and agendas, delays, confusion, swerving focus and industry bickering. However, this is to be expected of a technology that has been successful and widely adopted.

Java is a mature technology that has many masters, spawned a number of lucrative revenue streams, opens many doors and is consumed in many different ways. The competitive alternative ? Microsoft's .NET environment, although just as formidable, is beset with similar issues and one or two harder challenges.

That's the good news. The bad news is that Sun's role and involvement from technology, market and management perspectives alike has been opaque at best. Sun has never been particularly clear about how it actually makes money from Java or indeed maximising the opportunities. This doesn't really look like changing in the future.
For all that, I have enjoyed these past few days at the conference and gained a good deal of valuable insight; some disturbing, some surprising, others anticipated. Rumours of the conference's lack of importance and influence are, in my view, premature, and I will share my thoughts with you in future postings.
Far from what I was expecting, there has been a general air of optimism at the conference.

In ending this blog post I find myself with two regrets:

Firstly, the sheer number of interesting and enticing presentations made it inevitable that I should miss more than I could attend. Those that I did get to which I found particularly compelling, and would certainly recommend anyone getting the presentation materials or podcasts / webcasts of the sessions, were: "Sun Mobility General Session ? Java wherever you are" (the information delivered was certainly interesting and a good insight into JavaFX mobile development - and it's clear that Sun is after the same market as Microsoft and Adobe in this space); and "Real World, Real Time, Instant Results: Make Information work for you" presented by Jeff Henry of IBM (very interesting, insightful and for the most part non-partisan). I was booked on, but missed, "Service-oriented Architecture and Java Technology: Level-setting standards, Architecture and code" delivered by Steve Jones and Duane Nickull. By all accounts this had some good insight and valuable information from guys with a lot of end user and real world interactions. The other sessions I wanted to attend but they clashed were "The many moons of Eclipse" and "Case Studies from the JavaFX technology world".

My second regret is not having attended JavaOne during the past eight years as a senior analyst, if only to have seen it in its heyday when Java was the exciting new kid on the technology block and firms were rushing and fighting to be part of the show.

Given the size of the big hall and the number of organisations exhibiting I would definitely say that whilst veterans of the show might argue that the volumes are not up with its peak years (early 2000s) the show still maintains enough of an influence to entice the great and the good in this market and plenty of start-ups and innovators.

JavaOne, in my opinion, is still an incredibly important and very necessary conference. My worry is that it becomes increasingly a mouthpiece for Sun rather than a standalone entity.

Over the coming weeks and months, I am going to be writing a lot more about the state of the development market and taking a closer look at the value of some of the underlying technologies and products. I welcome any comments and questions and look forward to readers getting in touch to further the debate.

Links for 2008-05-06 [del.icio.us]

noreply@blogger.com (Neil Ward-Dutton) — Thu, 08 May 2008 00:06:00 +0000

Architecture astronauts take over - Joel on Software
Someone else makes the MS Live Mesh = Groove connection

SAP?s Apotheker: Business ByDesign costs led to delay | Between the Lines | ZDNet.com
I would *love* to find out how SAP has put together the current iteration, and how far that is away from what's needed for a really scalable multi-tenanted offering

Which comes first: process or service? Part 2

noreply@blogger.com (Neil Ward-Dutton) — Fri, 02 May 2008 14:50:00 +0000

The question of how to combine BPM and SOA came up a lot here at TIBCO's TUCON user event - and, a little disappointingly, the standard response seems to typically revolve around reinventing the three-tier architecture of the 1990s, just with more scope and scale.

I pointed out in the previous part of this post a few ways in which that perspective is too short-sighted. It's OK to view BPM and SOA as both essentially technology approaches to building and integrating applications, but this is a perspective that misses a big part of the potential business value of the combination.

What we're starting to see, though, in a few advanced organisations, is how top-down, business-driven approaches to service orientation and business process thinking can combine with bottom-up, technology-driven approaches. The model that we see links an approach to business architecture that leans on the concepts of process and service to describe business fundamentals, with an approach to technology architecture that uses the same concept to describe the operation of automated systems. The same concepts are used at multiple levels of abstraction and composition/decomposition, so the link is seamless.

To make this link, the concepts of process and service are united through a third concept: outcome. The middle section of the diagram below, which outlines a process- and service-oriented view of business architecture, calls this out.

This is how it lays out:

Outcomes are desired results. An outcome at the highest level is likely to be something concerned with the core value of the organisation, financial performance, etc. At this level, outcomes might link very straightforwardly to mission statements. At lower levels outcomes are going to be concerned with operational results - for example "product is delivered".

Services are commitments to achieve outcomes.

Processes are the methods through which outcomes are achieved.

One of the realisations that should come when you think about this approach is that service-oriented thinking can "drive" process thinking - but not only because technical process implementations can be wrapped with technical service interfaces, as I mentioned in the last post. More importantly, service-oriented thinking should drive process work because when you define business services (commitments to achieve outcomes) you're actually providing business context that shapes the KPIs and goals that you need to set for processes in BPM initiatives.

Another way to explain this aspect of service orientation is like this: when you model a process, and define a KPI and a target for that KPI, you're actually modelling aspects of a service "wrapper" for the process, as well as the process. You're defining what the commitment to achieve the outcome looks like, as well as the method you'll use to achieve the outcome. It's only when you start to think in terms of outcomes (and then services and processes) that this becomes clear, though.

There are other ways in which SOA and BPM can be intelligently combined to add value to both that aren't just about simplistic views of integration (and I'll try and get to some of those in future posts, watch this space) - but I think this is one of the most important. It's important because it helps people get their heads around a way of linking business architecture work with technical architecture work - with one consistent set of concepts. To date, there haven't been many ways to do this, and our research suggests that few organisations manage to make the link effectively today.

To come back to the post title: when you start to think about outcomes as a core concept in business and technology architecture, it becomes clear that it's not accurate to say either that services come first, or processes come first: the truth is that *outcomes* come first, and services and processes are two sides of the same coin in achieving the right results.

Links for 2008-04-28 [del.icio.us]

noreply@blogger.com (Neil Ward-Dutton) — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 00:06:00 +0000

Service Oriented Enterprise: SOA and WOA Comparison
More fuel for the SOA vs WOA fire. "This is excellent nonsensical dribble". Woo!

Enterprise Architecture in ANZ: What we sought in a tool for business/technology transformation and EA
Another great post about requirements for tooling to support EA initiatives

Enterprise Architecture in ANZ: What we learned about EA implementations
Great post about the motivations for EA work and the need to focus on stakeholders, outcomes - don't think of EA as a generic practice but understand your specific context for doing it.

Enterprise Initiatives: WOA: Quick-n-Dirty 2.0
"Remember, we are architects, not day-traders". Mike Kavis on WOA. Awesome.

Links for 2008-04-18 [del.icio.us]

noreply@blogger.com (Neil Ward-Dutton) — Sun, 20 Apr 2008 00:05:00 +0000

stackoverflow.com - Joel on Software
A new (free) programming Q&A community site. It'll be really interesting to see how this one pans out - what kind of structure will they put in place to enable open contributions, but also ensure the best quality answers? They're open to suggestions...

Which comes first: process or service? Part 1

noreply@blogger.com (Neil Ward-Dutton) — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 08:55:00 +0000

Over the years I've been helping to run MWD I've been to quite a few events, talked to many enterprise IT folks and talked to many tech vendors, too - and one of the topics that comes up most often is the relationship between BPM and SOA. There's been a bit of a run on the topic in the blogosphere lately. First, I was alerted to this post on CIO.com via the EDS fellows' blog in a post called SOA is a Business Process Architecture. At around the same time, I read The Problem with Process by Nick Malik (always good to read).

Too often, in presentations and papers, I see diagrams that replicate the old three-tier architecture of the '90s, but with a twist: instead of user interface, business logic and data access layers, now I keep seeing portal, BPM and SOA layers. Portals provide user interaction, and invoke processes; processes invoke services. Job done.

Looking at BPM and SOA purely in this way is short-sighted, disingenuous and dangerous. It looks at both initiatives through a very focused lens, and essentially says "BPM and SOA are about building and integrating applications". Not your father's applications I'll grant, but applications nonetheless - things with hard boundaries that have little awareness of other systems or resources that might exist, and little conceptual relationship to broader architectural or business considerations.

The first, and most obvious, point to make that blows this kind of picture apart is that it's mind-numbingly straightforward to wrap a process (or at least the initial invocation of a process) as a service. So *now* what's "on top" - process or service? This realisation has led to more enlightened commentators advocating that organisations consider processes and services more like a lasagne, with alternating layers of the two concepts. Services expose processes, processes call services, etc etc ad infinitum.

However even here we're only part way to the real answer, because this view also stems from seeing both BPM and SOA primarily from a "bottom up", software development- and integration-centric perspective. Of course, many people refute a view like this, and point out that "BPM is a business management approach, and SOA is a technology architecture approach - you can't lump them together so easily". In other (very simplistic) words BPM is a top-down, business-driven initiative, whereas SOA is a bottom-up, technology-driven initiative.

The two articles I've linked to above are great because they start to take a deeper look at the architectural and conceptual relationship between service and process. Both EDS Fellow Fred Cummins and Nick Malik start to pick away at the simplistic views that seem to hold sway in the minds of many at the moment.

Neither quite take the argument as far as they might, though. Through our industry research (for our book as well as our various free reports and consulting gigs), we've come to see that the value of both BPM and SOA comes from considering them neither purely as bottom-up initiatives focused on improving the development / integration of applications and resources, nor as top-down initiatives focused on exploring and elaborating business architecture. We already have a champion in the case of "top-down SOA" - the OASIS SOA Adoption Blueprints team. The real insights come, I think, when you see how top-down *and* bottom-up perspectives of service-orientation *and* process-orientation can all come together in a more holistic view of business and technology architecture.

I'll expand on what such a view entails in a Part 2 of this post, in the next few days.

Links for 2008-04-14 [del.icio.us]

noreply@blogger.com (Neil Ward-Dutton) — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 00:05:00 +0000

Comparing Amazon's and Google's Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) Offerings | TalkBack on ZDNet
Isn't this like trying to compare Solaris (or your favourite server OS) with J2EE?

Links for 2008-04-12 [del.icio.us]

noreply@blogger.com (Neil Ward-Dutton) — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 00:05:00 +0000

The Virtual Quill: A herring of a different color
Dave Kearns, who has been debating meta versus virtual directory with Kim Cameron, responds to Kim's point that metadirectories do not need to store all identity data
Independent Identity: Standards and Implementations
Oracle's Phil Hunt explains the potential role of the Identity Governance Framework (initiated by Oracle) and more specifically CARML and the AttributeServices API in identity bus/services
The elephant in the room « Identity Blogger
SunView Software's Jeff Bohren chips into the meta/virtual directory debate regarding Active Directory
The Ideal Government Project
A useful and interesting set of security statistics - data breaches; CCTV and so forth

Links for 2008-04-09 [del.icio.us]

noreply@blogger.com (Neil Ward-Dutton) — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 00:05:00 +0000

More on the second generation of metadirectory
A review of the evolution of metadirectories and how virtual directories are no better a solution to support today's distributed, service-oriented applications