SearchSOA.com Editor Jack Vaughan spoke recently with Ken Vollmer and Clay Richardson of Forrester Research to explain some of the confusion. In this podcast, get advice on how to navigate the market for BPM products and learn how applying SOA principles can enhance BPM. Also, hear how emerging innovations, such as BPM-as-a-Service and business exception management, may change the way business processes are managed. Their conversation is transcribed below.
|
|
SOA and BPM
• Internet Explorer: Right Click > Save Target As
• Firefox: Right Click > Save Link As
|
Jack Vaughan: This first question is for Clay. It's difficult with so many tools coming from so many directions to see what makes sense to an individual organization. Can you discuss the issue of how you match processes with available tools.
Clay Richardson: The key here is there are so many tools and so many suites out there around BPM, so much technology to choose from. What Forrester does to help segment the market and help customers with making the decision of which vender to go with or what path to go down is to recommend that customers start from the process or the process pain points that you're grappling with.
We really did the segmentation because we saw our customers saying one of three things. They were either saying I really want to get a hold of my system processes in terms of having systems talk to one another as one approach, or they were saying we're really having a lot of pain around getting people to collaborate as a second approach, or third, we hear customers talking about how they really need to get control of all the paper and content and document intensive processes in our organization.
So that really lays out the framework of the three different segments that we recommend customers look at in terms of what their process problems are. So we have human-centric, which is primarily focused on collaborative processes and really getting people to work together. Then we have integration-centric, which goes back to what I was saying in the second piece, of processes that cut across numerous systems that you need to get control of. And the third segment is document-centric. And there are vendors that support all three of these. So we really advocate starting first with looking at your pain points around processes and then figuring out which one of those three segments is most important to you.
JV: At SearchSOA we've always felt that SOA and BPM was a marriage made in heaven. But we are prejudiced. Ken, I'd like to ask you what's going on with SOA and BPM at this juncture in August 2009.
Ken Volmer: I'm reminded of the old commercial we used to see on TV a lot from the chemical company where they say, "We don't make X, but we make X better." And that's kind of what the situation is with service-oriented architecture. It's a concept but the concept has some strong foundations, such as an enterprise service bus for mediating transactions and moving information around effectively, or a service repository for storing and effective reuse of services that you create. So SOA increases the effectiveness of BPM projects just like they would for many other types of projects that an enterprise would get involved with. It relates to the reuse of assets, which leads directly to faster deployment of process improvements.
JV: Clay, how do you go about working with BPM as a service?
CR: As Ken weighted out BPM and SOA working together and how intertwined those two capabilities are, what we're also seeing vendors come out with is this capability of BPM as a service and it kind of extends the service metaphor, if you will, where now we're starting to look at providing platforms in the cloud that run as services that can be leveraged beyond the company firewall. So if you think about developing solutions and not needing to go out and buy this big platform and bring it in internally and stand up the BPM capability… Instead [you can think about] being able to have a service— essentially a BPM suite that's in the cloud that you don't have to install, and you don't have to do the same level of maintenance for. Even being able to develop BPM solutions that can then be consumed by either other services in house—meaning your own in-house IT team or once it's in the cloud—these services can also be consumed by external partners.
So it really extends out this idea of services, not just in terms of developing Web services or services that are really components. But it really focuses on services as a platform so that you can actually build a BPM solution out in the cloud and deploy it in the cloud to reduce the cost and cost of ownership for BPM. And we hear a lot of customers really trying to drive to reduce cost. A big thing that customers are looking at is reducing operational costs of BPM and across the spectrum of IT. We do see BPM as a service being adopted at a brisk pace. But looking out into the future, we'd say within the next three to five years it will become pretty much a mainstream capability both for public, out-in-the-cloud consumption and for private clouds where people will basically develop these solutions, put them in the internal company's private cloud and the services can be reused and accessed internally.
JV: Ken, teams get together and they discuss or argue over issues that have to do with processes or services. And I imagine events too are one way of looking at the world and exceptions are the dark underbelly of processes. How do these different elements work together? How do we assess them out?
KV: Obviously any process will have exceptions that happen and will generate an event or will be interpreted as an event. Some of the BPM tools have become very sophisticated in assisting enterprises with dealing with these events. They fall in a couple of different categories.
The first one would be what we call business exception management. This is where, say, a purchase order comes in and something doesn't match up with what was expected so it creates an event that kicks it out to a knowledge worker. Well that's good in itself but then the knowledge worker in the past had to go out and log into multiple systems and find out all the related information before they could make a decision on what to do.
Some of these more sophisticated business exception management tools will actually collect that information ahead of time and pass it to the knowledge worker with the actual event itself and drastically improve the response time.
Another area where events comes into play is that with BPM, the monitoring capability can be one feed into a complex event processing tool that can except feeds from multiple sources and correlate information by using some sophisticated mathematical algorithms and determine patterns that might not appear to the human eye, if you will.
So a good case would be how fraud detection is frequently augmented by complex event processing situations. When you look at the combined capability of business exception management and complex event processing, they can be pretty significant enhancements to a core BPM product.
