Are Business Process Management and Business Architecture a perfect match?

Whenever I suggest collaboration between these two worlds, I always observe some sort of astonishment from my interlocutors. Many Enterprise Architects or Business Architects do not realise there may be synergies. Business Process Management (BPM) team have not understood what Enterprise Architecture is all about and the other way around.... There is no a single definition of Business Process Management, often it means different things to different people. To keep it very generic, BPM relates to any activities an organization does to support its process efforts.


There are many activities which can be included in such efforts:
· The use of industry Business Reference Model (or Business Process Reference Model), a reference for the operational activities of an organization, a framework facilitating a functional Lines of Business, such as

o The Federal Enterprise Architecture Business Reference Model of the US Federal Government
o The DoD Business Reference Model
o The Open Group Exploration and Mining Business Reference Model (https://www.opengroup.org/emmmv/uploads/40/22706/Getting_started_with_the_EM_Business_Model_v_01.00.pdf)
o Frameworx (eTOM) for Telco companies
o The Supply Chain Operations Reference (SCOR®) model
o The SAP R/3 Reference Model
o The Oracle Business Models : Oracle Industry Reference Model for Banking, (IRM), Oracle Retail Reference Model
o And others...

· The use of organization specific Business Reference models
· The use of Business process improvement methodologies

o Lean, a quantitative data driven methodology based on statistics, process understanding and process control
o Six Sigma, a methodology that mainly focuses on eliminating bad products or services to clients by using statistical evaluation

· Business Process Reengineering, which in reality is a facet of BPM
· The understanding of Business Change Management, the process that empowers staff to accept changes that will improve performance and productivity
· The understanding of Business Transformation, the continuous process, essential to any organization in implementing its business strategy and achieving its vision
· The use of Business Rules Management which enables organizations to manage business rules for decision automation
· The understanding of Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) services to reduce costs and increase efficiency
· The support of Business Process modeling and design, which is illustrated description of business processes, usually created with flow diagrams. The model contains the relationship between activities, processes, sub-processes and information, as well as roles, the organization and resources. This can done with many notations such as flow chart, functional flow block diagram, control flow diagram, Gantt chart, PERT diagram, IDEF, and nowadays with the standard de facto notations such as UML and BPMN
· The support of BPM tools and suites implementation. With the right, process models can be simulated, to drive workflow or BPMS systems, and can be used as the basis for an automated process monitoring system (BAM)
· The support of Business Activity Monitoring (BAM), the ability to have end-to-end visibility and control over all parts of a process or transaction that spans multiple applications and people in one or even more companies.

To combine Business Process Management and Enterprise Architecture for better business outcomes is definitely the way forward, where BPM provides the business context, understanding, and- metrics, and Enterprise Architecture provides the discipline to translate business vision and strategy into architectural changes. Both are needed for sustainable continuous improvement. When referring to Enterprise Architecture, we would mainly refer to Business Architecture. Business Architecture involves more than just the structure of business processes. It also entails the organization of departments, roles, documents, assets, and all other process-related information.

Business Architects may be defining and implementing the Business Process framework and, in parallel, influencing the strategic direction for Business Process Management and improvement methodologies (e.g. Lean, Six Sigma). The business process owners and Business Analysts are working within their guidelines at multiple levels throughout the organizations’ business process. They have roles and responsibilities to manage, monitor and control their processes.
An important tool in developing Business Architecture is a Business Reference Model. These types of models are enormously beneficial. They can be developed in the organization to build and extend the information architecture. The shared vocabulary (verbal and visual) that emerges from these efforts promotes clear and effective communication.

To illustrate the touch points between Enterprise Architecture and Business Process Management, I have illustrated in the table below the synergies between the two approaches using TOGAF® 9.



In this table, we observe that, there is a perfect match between Business Process Management and the use of an Enterprise Architecture framework such as TOGAF. BPM is often project based and the Business Architect (or Enterprise Architect) may be responsible for identifying cross-project and cross-process capabilities. It can be considered as being the backbone of an Enterprise Architecture program. We can also add to this, that Service Oriented Architecture is the core operational or transactional capability while BPM does the coordination and integration into business processes.

When using BPM tools and suites, you should also consider the following functionalities: workflow, enterprise application integration, content management and business activity monitoring. These four components are traditionally provided by vendors as separate applications which are merged through BPM into a single application with high levels of integration. The implementation of a BPM solution should theoretically eliminate the maintenance and support cost of these four applications resulting in reducing the total cost of ownership.

Business Architecture provides the governance, alignment and transformational context for BPM across business units and silos. Enterprise Architects, Business Architects, Business Analysts should work together with BPM teams, when approaching the topic of Business Process Management. BPM efforts need structures and appropriate methodologies. It needs a structure to guide efforts at different levels of abstraction (separating “the what“ (the hierarchical structure of business functions) from “the how” (how the desired results are achieved), a documented approach and structure to navigate among the business processes of the organization, i.e. a Business Architecture. They also need a methodology such as an Enterprise Architecture framework to retain and leverage what they have learned about managing and conducting BPM projects.

BAM, CPE, BEM, or Operational BI, what are the differences?

Business Intelligence (BI) in many companies has been used for several years to monitor, report and analyze, and improve business performance. Until now, most BI applications have focused on managing strategic and tactical business plans, but now Business Activity Monitoring (BAM), Complex Event Processing (CPE), Business Event Management (BEM) and/or operational BI could add a new dimension to this otherwise mature software area.

Business success demands continuous visibility into operations and processes. Operational BI or “awareness” should reduce the time between the occurrence of a business event and initiation of a response, helping a company act on competitive opportunities. Practically all operational areas need increased operational BI - awareness. Order cancellation, a late order delivery, an imbalance between resource capacity and demand, and a stock-out are just a few examples of events that require immediate action.

Increasingly, lines of businesses realize that to become more responsive, they must accelerate the flow of information, analysis and the decision-making. Major benefits of operational BI - awareness, which extend beyond strategic and tactical decision-making to daily management, include:

• A real-time visibility into business processes (this would require automated processes through the use of Business Process Management suites (BPMs)
• An increased business agility and flexibility
• A maximized use of resources (human mostly)
• Minimized risk
• A collaboration with a broader set of participants
  

Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) is an event stream capture and has been around for many years. This is a technology and a technique that provide real-time access to key business metrics. The reasons for deploying BAM are to monitor key business objectives, anticipate operational risks, and reduce the time between a material event and taking effective action.

There are many BAM products from platform (e.g. IBM Websphere Business Monitor, Oracle BAM, BEA ProActivity Process Analysis (PA), Aptsoft product.

Business Event Monitoring (BEM) is a way to get machines in real-time to alert people when a business process is going wrong and needs human attention to get back on track. BEM focuses also on the business rules and then alerts humans when something goes wrong. The goal is to speed processes up by minimizing time lost because of an exception. As previously written, BAM monitors business processes in real time in an effort to support operational improvements. Where BAM typically concerns itself with managing a single business process, BEM is generally concerned with monitoring all current processes to provide meaningful alerts and analytics to users. We should think of BEM as real-time data mining. While BEM is not yet part of many vendor offerings, this technology is making an appearance in some products. Vitria Technology's Resolution Accelerator provides BEM capability. Lombardi Software's Undercover Agents provide also BEM functionality.

Operational BI is also about the use of operational intelligence to manage and optimize business processes. When this is deployed, the huge analytical power of BI is unleashed on everyday processes that can generate improvements in real-time. This can exist alongside traditional BI, helping organizations to improve business operations both at strategic and business process levels.

Operational BI is the way BI vendors try to sell “type of BAM” applications, but…

Currently, most of Operational BI products refer only to data sensors.

Are they linked to BPM? It seems not because they still continue to use ETL and data access replication principles. Additionally BI vendors are not the best vendors to follow some of the trends about BEM which is often seen as an extension to BAM.

Some vendors like Systar pretend to be “BAM” but are in the same basket than the BI vendors in that case. And only BPM vendors with BAM features are able top provide such link. In counterpart BAM products often do not store good historical data like for example a BI do. It is then difficult to make comparison between operation data with historical data.

As already described, the ultimate goal of BAM environments is to immediately react from dashboards and the goal of BEM is to link the detection of events (including compound events collected for example by CEP) and then provide different management features like : diagnosis help, root cause analysis, management by exception. All of those require BAM (or operational BI) to work closer with the event generator: BPM in particular or other sensors. If we link those at data level only we miss the point. That means that every time we change a process we would have for example to reconfigure the data access, KPI and so on. Operational BI products are not
bad solutions but good for some customers and not enough for others.

The term BAM may become out of vogue in the future and vendors will turn to marketing their products under the banner of Operational BI. BI and BPM are two separate technology areas, complement each other and will converge over the next three to five years. Currently they are being used today in their respective worlds with very little overlap.

Business Processes and Services are not always correctly associated

For a few months, discussion around processes and services has been a hot topic in my company. Everybody has his own interpretation and very few information exist related to the subject.

This post is the follow up to a previous article I wrote a while ago:

What is a Service?

It is important to specify that sometimes when people talk, the term Service has to be considered either as an ITSM Service or an SOA Service-web service. This is clear to me that BPM and SOA should be tightly integrated, but let’s look at this slightly differently…

A Business Process has activities. An activity could be one to many Services.

But you can also look at this in another way...

A Service is one to many Business Processes. A Business Process has activities, and as already said, an activity is one to many Services. Isn’t this confusing?

What I try to say is that we need to be clear (at least for me...) when we talk of a Service. Are we talking of Service in Service Management terms, or in SOA Terms?

As an example:

The Service "e-mail" has several Business Processes such has:

Creation of email, classification, forwarding, etc...
Calendar Management, invitation for meetings, reminders, etc..
etc..

If for example we define the Calandar Management process and look at activities, maybe at some stage we would define a Service which lookup for availability of people in a meeting. This would be an SOA Service "Availability of people"...

To summarize and be clear, I would claim that ITSM Services could count one to many Business Processes, and Business Processes could one to many SOA Services. “E-mail” is an ITSM Service and “creation of an email” being a transaction is an SOA Service.

Does this make sense?

"The CMDB Initiative..”, but where is the evolution?

Late April, a group of system and service management vendors decided to propose a standard related to a repository for IT assets, and their configurations items change over time.

In other words, BMC, Fujitsu, IBM and HP decided to create a model for a CMDB which would allow storing information such as desktop and laptop client images or configurations, servers, storage pools or networks and so on.

Very often information is spread among various sources and no standards exist on how to exchange meta data from all these potential sources of CMDB information. Today, the CMDB interfaces that exist are all proprietary, which is the problem that this group wants to tackle.
This working group will issue a white paper within the next month that will spell out their initial goals in more detail. And by the end of the year, they hope to have a draft specification proposal, at which point they hope to formalize the process by choosing a standards body.

But is that enough?

Focusing on data exchange is fine but shouldn’t they also consider the CMDB Meta data and propose a common model eventually re-usable by third parties?

All vendors’ CMDB have their own Meta model and as from now I have never seen from any vendor a roadmap related to the repository. As an example, with the acquisition of both Mercury and Peregrine, HP initially announced the migration from the HP Openview Service Desk, to Service Center, and now has announced that next CMDB would be the one from Mercury, which is in fact…Appilog… (An acquisition from Mercury). So what!

There is a need for a “next generation CMDB” for the following reasons:

- BPM based on a SOA architecture invoque IT components (software on hardware…) and we should have a link between a Business Process and the underlying Cis. A CMDB should also be process based.
- Relation is important that’s for sure but dependencies is another key topic. How does infratructure relates one to the other, how information relates one to the other, how physically components relates one to the other, how does application code relates (Cendura acquired by CA is maybe one of the only company which deleivred that capability) etc… A CMDB should be also able to add dependencies on the top of relationships.

This initiative will help the concept of federated CMDB and information exchange but will not really look at today’s requirements… A unified Meta model could be an interesting initiative for these vendors as this would create a new generation of unified Service management/Business Process management solutions.

IT Processes, Business Processes, who is coordinating what?

More and more IT departments refer to IT Governance, Best Practices, quality and processes. To run efficiently an IT shops, processes are supposed to help companies to excel. The disctinction between best practices and processes is not so clear but let’s assume that this is complimentary. Processes are either standardized; refer to existing frameworks such as ITIL, Six Sigma, eTOM and other best practices.

An IT Process is also a Business Process. It has only an “IT Flavour”.

Looking at the Business side, Business Process Reegineering (BPR) and now Business Process Management (BPM) are activities which also look at improving how a Business works. Some companies develop a target Business Architecture describing the product and/or service strategy, and the organizational, functional, process, event, information, and geographic aspects of the business environment.

Very often, based on my experience, and observations, IT processes do not have a process owner. If there are owners, sometimes they are siloed. As an example, the ITIL Incident Management process owner does not work in harmony with the ITIL Availability Management process owner, etc. Sometimes, politics, company’s mindset, or personnel agendas, prevent to do a consistent job.

On the Business side, it happens also that processes are siloed and not cross-functional. The integration between IT Processes and Business Processes is even not considered despite the fact that all Business Processes should be linked to IT Processes. The processes and activities of a Line of Business have Incidents, Problems, issues with availability etc…

The first step would be to have for the IT department a Service Manager (e.g. ITIL) to coordinate all the processes related to IT Service Management. On a parallel, the Business should also have owners for their processes.

Recently I was looking at some documentation related to the SAP ESA (Enterprise Service Oriented Architecture) and found a very interesting comment from Shai Agassi, member of the SAP Executive Board and president of the SAP Product and Technology Group (PTG). He claimed that “Chief Information Officer” function is morphing into two distinctive roles: the Chief Process Innovation Officer (CPIO), and the Chief IT Officer (CITO, to coin a new acronym). In this new model, the CPIO is in charge of innovative business processes and continuous process integration.”

All processes have definetly to be coordinated, IT or not in a consistent way. As improving processes allows to bring innovation, this new role (Chief Process Innovation Officer), would allow companies to create new synergies, between the Business and IT, considering the CPIO as a partner of LOBs, in charge of processes deisgns with the business’ network. That position would require new skills to be developed as part of the IT organization. Such a role would be the best way to create an harmony for IT/Business processes.

BPMs and SOA

A very interesting article has been published by Celia Wolf and Paul Harmon in BPTrends on the 26th of September. The content is related to the BPMs Market and the Majors.

I have found the following paragraph a little bit exaggerated…

"Probably the major development, over the course of the summer, is subtler. All of the software/infrastructure vendors are continuing to put a lot of marketing cycles into promoting Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). At the same time, there has been a growing recognition that SOA, without BPM, doesn't mean much. You don't do SOA just as an exercise in technology; you do SOA to provide better support for business processes, which you define in BPM. This is the clear message in all IBM's WebSphere advertising and it is increasingly the common theme of all of the major vendors who are promoting the move to SOA. Thus, increasingly, the attention that was focused on BPM is becoming mixed with the SOA marketing effort."

Even if SOA can be (or should be...) coupled to BPM initiatives, there are many situations where companies implement SOA for other reasons:

- Composite applications
- Portal integration
- Information Hub
- Migration from “old” client server applications to new architecture models
- Mash-up applications
- B2B

In fact, software vendors simply try to sell at the same time BPMs with the underlying technology...and all the associated professional services…

There are cases where SOA is justified only by the above mentioned reasons.

What is a Service?

More and more we start to see articles on the web which are comparing Service Management with Service Oriented Architecture. ITIL is an integrated set of best-practice recommendations with common definitions and terminology which support many IT processes such as Incident management, problem management, change management, configuration management, etc. There is plenty of literature on the web which explain what are these best practices, how we run a program, and how this framework relate to IT Governance.

On the other side, we have SOA, Service Oriented Architecture, which is often associated to BPM, Business process Management. A Business process is a set of automated or non-automated activities, or tasks, exchanging data, where we define flows, and assign roles. An SOA enable a BPM initiative by associating services to task. These services are generally speaking IT components launched by a set of specific SOA technologies such as SOAP, XML, HTTP, WSDL, etc.

When comparing Services in Service Management terms and Services in SOA terms, there is very often some sort of confusion.

ITIL is focused on the provision of services by the IT department to the customer/user. Now these services which are used by the user/customer can take the form of applications that they use (e.g. email services, components of HR systems, ERP and financial systems) or other services which are utilized, such as internet access, printing services, etc. SLAs are then determined for each particular service. Now ITIL encourages the IT department to view these services and determine the underlying technologies which are required to provision these services. For example, UNIX or Windows Servers, Network equipment, Printers, etc. and to identify each outside party that may then provide these underlying technologies. OLA and underpinning contracts are then used to ensure that these parties perform their duties so that the IT department can then fulfil their SLAs.

A SOA Service is defined as a unit of work to be performed on behalf of some computing entity, such as a human user or another program. SOA defines how two computing entities, such as programs, interact in such a way as to enable one entity to perform a unit of work on behalf of another entity. Service interactions are defined using a description language. Each interaction is self-contained and loosely coupled, so that each interaction is independent of any other interaction.

We observe that the SOA Service is much more granular that an IT Service and finally, the latest is maybe the aggregation of several SOA Services…

In other words, SOA and Service Management are not identical in terms of Services definition and this creates lots of confusion in the IT Community. Service Management can be utilized to manage an SOA implementation or solution or the ITIL processes could handle SOA Services as software/hardware components, but Service Management is not a subset of SOA.