I came across these video clips introducing SOA posted on YouTube. Though, these are 3 different videos, they present 3 different analogies of the same concept. Take a look!

SOA as building blocks:


SOA as wardrobe:


SOA as music notes:

The business process management (BPM) blogosphere is buzzing with discussions on integration of BPM and business intelligence (BI) infrastructure. Some of the bloggers and analysts have even predicted consolidation of BPM and BI offerings into a single product. Business activity monitoring (BAM) is considered to be an integral part of modern BPM systems.

BAM makes BPM a complete process lifecycle management infrastructure by enabling user organizations to manage process life-cycle end-to-end in terms of "Define - Execute - Control - Monitor - Improve". In my opinion, BAM is nothing but process intelligence functionality that is a subset of BI, and hence I find this sudden surge in BI and BPM integration discussions, indeed, very surprising, as it always existed. BPM vendors have gone about addressing the BAM need of their users / customers in two ways:

• Creating BAM functionality within the BPM system
• Integrating their BPM system with a provider of BI system provider

The key question is how user organizations should enable the BPM implementations with BI capabilities. This largely depends on two factors:

• Whether the BPM system being implemented by the user organization has BAM capabilities, and
• Whether the user organization has implemented a BI system.

If user organizations already have or intend to implement a BI system, then they should leverage their BI implementations by integrating BPM with BI system.

I strongly feel that in time large software vendors such as IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, and SAP will combine their infrastructure system offerings under one solution. Such infrastructure software will include BPM (workflow), business rules, content management, BI, portal, and integration functionality. However, these offerings will be available as separate components and user organizations will have options to pick and choose components depending on their need. So do expect acquisitions and consolidations across these software domains. Until then, IT managers and leaders will have a tough time making choices while selecting systems and vendors for implementations across these software domain areas.

Infosys Technologies last week announced that they are planning to launch their core banking solution "Finacle" as a service (SaaS). However, such a service would be offered only along with the large deals.

Thats an interesting development. Because almost about a year back I had written a blog entry "BPM Series: SaaS, Shared Services, BPO - Will they converge?", which discussed possible convergence of SaaS, Shared Services and BPO service offerings from vendors. I quote: "I expect SaaS to mature over a period of time and then convergence of SaaS and BPOs is simply inevitable. Already organizations such as IBM, and Infosys have both package applications as well as process outsourcing services to offer to the market. What would really stop Infosys to offer loan processing service deployed on their core banking solution - Finalce as SaaS. In India I know at least one bank, which have outsourced their complete IT set-up to Wipro. What would stop this bank from using software applications developed on Wipro’s Flow-brix as SaaS in combination with credit card payment collection services from Wipro’s outsourcing unit. Just think about it."

I guess Infosys is taking first step in a direction where they may offer Financle based SaaS and BPO service in future.

Yesterday I and a couple of colleagues from our BPM team spent some time exploring WebSphere Process Modeler. The purpose of our exploration was to examine the possibility of using WebSphere Process Modeler as a process modeling tool across the organization replacing Visio.

Unfortunately none of us are formally trained to use WS Process Modeler. So, after spending almost about 3 hours we managed to define a simple 5-7 step process representing our New Business Applications process. Here are my initial impressions about WS Process Modeler:

- The most disappointing part of the process modeler is the footprint it occupies on a client machine. It needs at least 1 GB RAM! This will be the biggest obstacle in our attempts to make it as the preferred process modeling tool amongst user community.

- The tool offers 3 views - basic, intermediate and advanced. This is indeed a very good feature. For example, a smart or key user can start with basic view and subsequently the analyst can take over and build the process model further to make it ready for technical development on WebSphere Integration Developer (WID).

- The tool would score low on ease of use or intuitiveness. However, I do not blame IBM for this. WS process modeler is a fairly comprehensive tool addressing very wide range of process modeling and process simulation needs. And hence it is likely to be very complex.

- The feature I liked the most was the on-line error log it provided for users / analyst to fix the process model for syntax or grammar. This is a very useful features for beginners as it provides them help at design time itself to fix the model before deployment.

Had a frustrating time last week at the office dealing with our vendor engaged in the delivery of BPM project. This vendor is a small group of "passionate" technology specialists. Unfortunately every week they come to us with some reason or other seeking extension of project delivery timelines.

The implementation partner we chose is a niche workflow focussed IT services company with limited resource pool. The talent and knowledgebase based on which we awarded the assignment is concentrated with only few individuals who are now focussed on business acquisition and not on delivery unlike in the past. Their second line of executives working below the founders is not yet ready and resource pool of technical engineers and analysts is probably not increasing at the speed it should be. Attracting talented resources in a growing economy such as India is a challenge. Given a choice, an IT software engineer or an aspiring business analyst would prefer to work with global IT giants rather than this small firm.

The company consists of talented technocrats but doesn't have sound project management capabilities. Neither they are equipped with methodology and tools necessary to deliver complex assignments such as BPM. They can solve a complex technical issue but are not able to deliver the project as a whole.

I still remember dealing with one of the founders of this company during the sales cycle few month ago. He had proudly proclaimed that what separated his company from the others is the passion of his people for workflow technology. Unfortunately passion alone doesn't assure success.

In the hindsight, I think we should have asked the BPM vendor, which is a large global IT giant to project manage the implementation initiative. A learning and key takeaway from the project for us for our future roll-outs.