Articles

The Role of SOA in Business / IT Architecture Alignment

Author(s):

William Ulrich

President, TSG, Inc.

Organizations have two universes in constant flux; business architectures and IT architectures. Now a third factor has entered the mix – services oriented architecture (SOA). As organizations seek to align business and IT architectures, SOA can play a key role in streamlining this process. This article discusses how SOA helps align business and IT architectures to deliver more effective, more efficient responses to ongoing business demands – on a transitional basis and over the long-term.

The Ins and Outs of Business Rules

Author(s):

BPMInstitute.org

Business Relationship Manager - Product Lifecycle Management, Chevron Corporation

In the previous article, Who, What and How of a Business analyst, we examined the role and responsibilities of an IT Business Analyst. In this article, we shall focus on the basic concepts of business rules. In the upcoming articles, we shall investigate what business rules mean to a Business Analyst and how they lead to the transformation into a Business Rules Analyst. A lot of research has been pursued by eminent experts in the field. In this article, we shall learn the basic principles of business rules.

BPMS Watch: BPM and SOA: Are the Communities Starting to Merge?

Author(s):

BPMInstitute.org

Business Relationship Manager - Product Lifecycle Management, Chevron Corporation

Last fall in a column called “BPM and SOA: One Technology, Two Communities” I said that the big middleware vendors pushing the BPEL standard seemed to understand orchestration as a critical piece of the SOA story but had no clue what business process management is all about.

Backwards BPM – Start with the End

Author(s):

Raj Ramesh

Chief Story Teller, TopSigma

Introduction

If you are one of the do-it-yourself types and just completed your taxes, the IRS estimates that you probably spent about 44 hours preparing it. It’s no wonder that 80% of U.S. citizens believe that our tax code is too complex and has to be simplified. If you were in charge of fixing the tax mess, where would you start?

Rules for the Masses

Author(s):

Brian Stucky

Managing Director, Business Decision Management, Allegiance Advisory Group

The wave of successful implementations, stories of agility and huge ROI, and the unparalleled need for rule-based systems has been well documented. The likelihood for this trend to continue was anticipated as far back as 2004 when Gartner suggested that “1 in 3 applications would employ some form of variable business rules by 2007.” Think about the prediction for a moment – 1 out of every 3 applications having variable business rules. That’s a staggering number.

8 Things Most People Misunderstand About SOAs

Author(s):

BPMInstitute.org

Business Relationship Manager - Product Lifecycle Management, Chevron Corporation

As I go from conference to conference speaking on the development of SOAs I’m always surprise to hear how much people don’t understand about this concept. Perhaps it is the marketing engines around the many vendors grabbing land in this space, or perhaps it’s how SOAs are explained in the main stream IT press. No matter how you got it wrong, it’s time to get it right.

Number One: Service-Oriented Architectures are a new concept.

Not really.

Process Management Approach Leads to Competitive Government

Author(s):

BPMInstitute.org

Business Relationship Manager - Product Lifecycle Management, Chevron Corporation

Five years ago, telecommunications companies operating in Florida faced a baffling array of taxes levied at the local level. Each municipality and local governmental entity had their own tax tables and methods of collection. “As the U.S.

Interview with Brett Champlin: Chicago Preview

Author(s):

BPMInstitute.org

Business Relationship Manager - Product Lifecycle Management, Chevron Corporation

I spoke with Brett Champlin recently and asked him about the upcoming BrainStorm Chicago Conference(s) and what is new for 2006.

Problems Implementing a Balanced Scorecard

Author(s):

Andrew Campbell

Mr, Ashridge Executive Education

There is really nothing wrong with the concept of Balanced Scorecard. The main problem is that it does not provide practical guidance for deployment, and some executives view it as a “quick fix” that can easily be installed in their organizations. Implementing a balanced metrics system is an evolutionary process, not a one-time task that can be quickly checked off as “completed”. If executives do not recognize this from the beginning and fail to commit to the long term, then the organization will realize disappointing results. However, some approaches (e.g. Rummler-Brache) allow for a rapid start to the metrics system evolution.

Here are some of the key issues I have seen over the past several years that can cause a Balanced Scorecard initiative to fail:

Poorly Defined Metrics

Bringing Analytics into Processes Using Business Rules

Author(s):

James Taylor

Faculty Member, BPMInstitute.org and CEO and Principal Consultant, Decision Management Solutions

As more and more companies adopt Business Process Management Systems (BPMS) to automate key business processes, they are also seeing the value of enhancing this technology with Business Rules Management Systems (BRMS). When processes rely on complex business decisions, it makes more and more sense to use business rules to automate these decisions. Not only are business rules better for delivering clarity and agility in decision-making, the use of a BRMS allows rules to be shared across processes, across BPMSs and between a BPMS and other implementation platforms.