In part one of this article, I provided an introduction to applying the concept of sustainability to business rules.
Sustainable Business Rules: An Introduction – Part 2 of 3
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Business Architecture: Creation and Application
Business Architecture is not an intuitively obvious concept. It does not conjure up an immediate vision of what it is, or what it comprises. With this inherent disadvantage – the business can’t articulate it easily – how can it be used to align IT with the business?
Business Architecture includes three components: the Functional Architecture, the Process Architecture and the Information Architecture. There are well documented methodologies for developing each component.
The Elusive Missing Link
As one website puts it, history is a puzzle made up of a million different pieces. For business history, the pieces tend to be automation artifacts. You may be translating pieces of history into BPM and BR technology. At times, you operate as a historian, studying...
Understanding “Services”
In the last column, I introduced the topic of services engineering and why it is going to be so important. The vast majority of the labor force is employed in services today, and nearly 80 percent of our GDP is from services industries.
Getting Team Involvement in Process Change
If you’ve worked in the corporate world for any length of time, you’ve probably experienced a merger or acquisition somewhere along the way. Personally, I’ve gone through five in 15 years (which may have been a contributing factor to starting my own business). Each time I’ve been bothered by the overlooked opportunities and communication snafu’s that have resulted in poor morale and decreased productivity. But does that really matter? After all, the company isn’t permanently damaged – gradually morale improves and the productivity gets back on track.
Organizational Governance: Key to Business/IT Architecture Alignment
When executives cannot see their way clear to address structural dysfunction within their organization, then attempts to align business architecture and IT architecture will see limited success. This does not imply that BPM, SOA and systems modernization cannot deliver tactical value. It does imply that these initiatives should be coupled with macro level efforts to recognize and address structural weaknesses across organizational infrastructures that impede business architecture and IT architecture alignment.
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.
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.
BPMS Watch: Can Business Analysts Model Exception Handling?
It’s conventional wisdom in business that 80% of the problems are caused by 20% of the work – the “exceptions.” In BPM, therefore, you’d think that exception handling would be a critical focus of process modeling and analysis. In most cases you’d be wrong.
Certainly the designers of the Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN) standard at BPMI (now part of OMG) had exception handling in mind from the start. BPMN introduces to process modeling the notion of intermediate events.
It Takes Two to Tango: BPM and SOA – Part II
In the first part of this article, I discussed the need for BPM and SOA to come together. In this part, I shall make an effort to predict the effect this tango may have on the enterprise. From the Forrester point of view, BPM can be viewed from three distinct perspectives. The first one is in relation to human-centric business processes, traditionally called human workflow management. The second one has content –centric business processes in focus.
Sustainable Business Rules: An Introduction – Part 1 of 3
Introduction
As a business rules approach becomes more widely accepted as a standard practice for business systems development, the concepts, methodologies, and tools that support this approach will need to mature and evolve further. I would like to introduce a new concept that looks at business rules from a point of view of sustainability. In other words, I’m coining this concept with the term “Sustainable Business Rules”. In part one of this three part article, I will explore this concept and introduce the characteristics of sustainable business rules.
