What is business architecture? If you ask ten business architects, you’re likely to get ten overlapping definitions clustered, to varying degrees, somewhere around the correct answer. But what is that answer?
So, why are organizations looking towards their “comfort vendors” and “comfort technologies?” It’s a matter of path of least resistance and lack of education.
Path of least resistance because the relationship is already established, and you don’t have to go through the hassle of getting to know new players, or many new players.
The BPMN specification presents lots of technical definitions and rules, but it does not teach you how to create process models that are effective in their primary mission – maximizing shared understanding of the as-is or to-be process. To do process modeling effectively, you need to go beyond the spec and learn a basic methodology, best practices, and specific diagram patterns to use in common situations. To illustrate the point, here are ten tips for effective modeling in BPMN.
Ever notice that executives can call attention to a problem but they don’t know what it takes to get it fixed? In contrast, workers have lots of ideas of how to fix things, but they don’t have the authority to get improvements made. And conversations between the two groups are too constrained or conflicted to drive corrective action. To make matters worse, neither group seems to know the whole process and be able to determine how changing one part might impact another. In short, we have trouble finding both the forest and the trees.
Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) represents a more flexible approach to building IT solutions. Combining SOA with other complementary technologies and approaches further enhances the ability to build more agile solutions. These solutions are easier to change, provide improved access to time-critical information and are more aware of – and responsive to – business events throughout the value chain.
Complex and proprietary ERP systems symbolize the final evolution of “Old IT”. They are the embodiment of a frame of mind that is inherent in the culture of the industrial economy and its great invention – the assembly line. That mindset attempts to organize every activity down to the lowest levels of detail. It makes rules and regulations for everything and then tries to run each activity over and over, faster and faster without changing anything. This is how you get greater and greater productivity at lower and lower costs; this is what we call efficiency.
Business architecture is poised to make significant inroads this year. While business architecture emerged as a distinct area of focus in 2006 and matured during 2007, it is poised for a big year in 2008. A number of factors are beginning to converge that will make 2008 a turning point for this essential discipline including a new focus on standards, convergence of frameworks and solidification of the role of business architecture in enterprise governance.
In these pages over the last year we have focused on the business value of separating Business Rules from Business Process, and using Business Decisions as both organizing principal for those Business Rules, and as a means of managing the rules. The value of the Business Decision Management (BDM) approach is multifold, as the Business Decision is the natural means of connecting Business Rules to Business Process in a BPM environment.
I have long railed against OMG’s inexcusable omission of even minimal support for model portability in the BPMN standard. In the forever-stuck-in-final-edit version 1.1, they still haven’t even provided an XML storage format, or serialization, for BPMN, much less a list of the elements and attributes that any “compliant” tool must support. Yet in my BPMN training, students simply assume such portability exists.
With the advent of rich internet applications and extensible interfaces such as AJAX, we now have the ability to quickly create mashups to solve specific business problems using standard dynamic interfaces that front services. Mashups provide powerful ways to take existing applications and services, and create something even more useful for business.
We could say that the lines between the enterprise and the Web are blurring…first blurred at the content or information levels with the early mashups, and now at the service and process levels as well.
Everyone starts here.
You're looking for a way to improve your process improvement skills, but you're not sure where to start.
Earning your Business Process Management Specialist (BPMS) Certificate will give you the competitive advantage you need in today's world. Our courses help you deliver faster and makes projects easier.
Your skills will include building hierarchical process models, using tools to analyze and assess process performance, defining critical process metrics, using best practice principles to redesign processes, developing process improvement project plans, building a center of excellence, and establishing process governance.
The BPMS Certificate is the perfect way to show employers that you are serious about business process management. With in-depth knowledge of process improvement and management, you'll be able to take your business career to the next level.
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