My very first BPMS Watch column, over three years ago, was titled “Without a BPMS, It’s Not Really BPM.” And to a large degree I still believe that, although today I would probably tone it down to...

Case Study: Managing Process Across the Enterprise

George Thomas is the Enterprise Chief Architect at GSA. He focuses on enterprise wide architecture using open standards based, process-centric, and service oriented modeling methodology and tools.

Thomas began his talk by covering grammar and modeling formalisms from selected GSA adopted industry standards. These were presented as a framework for developing the executable service oriented business process models, which can be automatically deployed.

The GSA uses a tool from Data Access Technologies that integrates CCA/FEA design and J2EE runtime environments. The target models interact over the internet with existing systems. There are various other tools in use, with model driven development capabilities for code generation. The models created are simple Java programs giving the ability to make web-based business simulations that can react in real time when the business models are executed.

Architectural driven modernization is from OMG (Object Management Group) and automates the infrastructure discovery process. Migration tools that go from the mainframe to SOA are from the mature legacy modernization community. The goal is to analyze the code base and generate a logical model. Language parsers and analysis tools show the dependencies and flow of the applications and data. They have an extensible Meta Object Facility based, Oracle backed repository from which business rules can be discovered. You can use tools from a number of vendors for both Architecture Driven Modernization (ADM) and Model Driven Architecture (MDA) approaches and still end up with interoperable and portable information repositories.

The Collaborative Role Interactions (CRI) objective is to generate implementations to the middleware framework. There are roles within roles within roles in the context of specific collaboration, which is both a feature and a problem.

Thomas spoke of the concept of modeling fatigue, which is a term that describes the situation when there isn't a formal grammar or syntax for the models. Without a formal context, what the model does is only understood by its original creator and nobody else. This is why there is so much duplication of effort. The models exist but can't be used because what they are and what they do is not generally known. For the GSA, the protocols group the role interactions into conversation topics so they can be mapped to a Web service, a Java interface, or a message queue. The protocols organize conversations choreographed by the roles. This approach is used to develop the value chains in the enterprise and isolate the business processes within each chain.

What they end up with is a uniform business structure. The business context includes:

• The one GSA structure connects the value chains

• Every SSO has a One GSA model buildout

• A buildout is a SSO specialization of One GSA, that inherits the uniform One GSA structure

• An SSO buildout is an elaboration of the generic uniform structure

• An SSO buildout may be unique or common to another SSO buildout for any value chain

• These variances can be easily be examined due to One GSA EA Uniform Business Context

The GSA is putting this all together in an Open Source E-Government Reference Architecture (OSERA) integrated design and runtime toolset which is deployed to JBoss.

A Service Oriented Integration Platform (SOIP) is an engine where your service runs with a deployment target that is horizontally scalable which creates a Business Process Virtual Machine (BPVM), which is long running, boundary crossing transaction choreographies for Business Activity Monitoring (BAM).

The semantic interoperability challenge is to create a system that is tool agnostic so that it can derive transformation models to and from various representations. Thomas said that the GSA used an elegant approach to executable EA in moving from stovepipes to shared services. The integrated design, runtime and meta-data management toolset insured semantic interoperability and allowed code generation through the actual models.

George Thomas recently spoke on this topic at a recent BrainStorm Business Process Management Conference. For more information on this conference, visit www.BPMConference.com

To hear the archived audio file and view the pdf file of this presentation, visit: www.bpminstitute.org/presentations/featured-presentation/article/case-study-managing-process-across-the-enterprise/news-browse/1.html

Jon Huntress

Special Events Correspondent

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