Service Oriented Architecture is one thing; creating a high-scale – and resilient – SOA is something else altogether. Let’s examine several approaches to high-scale SOA computing.
You Should Plan to Fail
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Realizing the Strategic Promise of SOA Requires SOA Governance
Recent tactical success in the utilization of Web services has brought renewed attention to the timing for a strategic commitment to Service Oriented Architectures (SOA). Early adopters have been investing in SOA for the past five years but now the development of more rigorous methodologies and technologies, and the maturing of standards, are making SOA accessible to everyone.
BPM – A Cure for Institutional Memory Loss
Across the federal government, large numbers of baby boomers are reaching the age of retirement. In 2006, more than 60,000 people left the civil service. The federal Office of Personnel Management believes that 2009 will be the peak year for boomer retirements. What can federal agencies do now, to stop this massive loss of institutional knowledge?
Stepped-up recruiting and staffing efforts will help a little, as will additional emphasis on outsourcing.
The Grail: Strategic Process Work
The notion of process is of utmost value to organizations, but the reality has often fallen short. The power of process is potentially far more powerful than today’s fragmented practices. With the right approach, however, process can have even more impact on organizational results than it did in the eighties and nineties. More specifically, process is the key to designing and operating organizations to deliver unique, sustained value.
So what is happening today?
BPMS Watch: Roundtripping Revisited
In the early days of BPM – four or five years ago – everyone thought BPEL was the BPM standard, at least for runtime execution. Not long after, the importance of business-friendly process modeling came to the fore, and BPMN emerged as the standard for that. The mismatch between graph-oriented BPMN models, where you can route the flow just about anywhere, and block-oriented BPEL, where you can’t, didn’t seem to worry BPM vendors. After all, a model was just a model, a business requirements document in diagrammatic form.
Achieving Business Agility
Often, competitive environments change faster than a firm’s responding processes and decision making abilities. Most organizations fail at executing strategies designed to improve their position in the market.
A Systems Approach to Business Process Management
The Challenge
I have come across businesses where some problems are chronic. In other words, these problems have existed for a long time but nobody attempts to fix them because they are thought to be “unfixable.” I have also come across businesses where problems are approached with a quick-fix mentality.
Facilitation Skills for BPM Professionals
In the past year I’ve heard increased chatter about the need for improved facilitation skills in the BPM arena including at the November New York BrainStorm BPM Conference where facilitation skills were highlighted as a necessary competency of Business Analysts1. So what are these facilitation skills everyone is talking about?
What is Facilitation?
Simply put, facilitation is a structured way of helping teams think, discuss, and make decisions in order to achieve their desired goals. And, like any other discipline, it requires a specialized skill set. The larger or more complex the situation, the more honed the skills of the facilitator need to be.
Innovation Pioneer of the Year: You!
Erik Weihenmayer is an acrobatic skydiver, long distance biker, marathon runner, skier, mountaineer, ice climber, and rock climber. Erik graduated from Weston High School in Connecticut in 1987. As the school’s wrestling captain, he represented the state in National Freestyle Wrestling Championships. In 1991, he graduated from Boston College, and in the same year, he trekked in the Pamir Mountains of Tajikistan.
Power Off, Not Lights Out
I recently attended a dot-com launch. What was unique about this particular launch was that the company does not own any servers, and they do not have a data center or even rack space in a co-location facility! Instead they run on virtual servers controlled with a Web service interface, and store their data “in the cloud” using a Web service.
Virtualization is almost a cliché in 2007. IDC lowered its server revenue forecast as a direct result of virtualization. Especially because IDC’s report missed the new phenomenon known as “Web Scale Computing”.
