SOA

The folks from Cordys presented their view of the new business operations platform. Current systems development is in the context of four key game-changing trends: Consumerization Not just technology but can deliver business processes as services using the Internet Commoditization Virtualization Not just of hardware but of processes and teams Globalization In this environment, processes [...]

Thomas Erl presented on the Architecture of Service-Orientation to start the breakout sessions and build on his opening comments. The key challenge is that of the endless IT progress cycle – the business continually needs more and different support from IT to deal with changes to business models while IT has new and changing capabilities [...]

The SOA Symposium started today in the AJAX Stadium in Amsterdam. The opening keynotes were actually in the Stadium itself – we all sat at the halfway line. Thomas Erl and Sandy Carter gave quick intros and I will add some comments later but I could not type so this is just a placeholder have [...]

Eric Roch had a nice post today – SOA Decision Services – in which he references some of our work and our book. He ends with a great quote: As SOA matures we are finding new ways to architect systems and receiving benefits from SOA in unexpected ways. How often have you seen improvement of [...]

As I said before I am speaking at the SOA Symposium in Amsterdam in October – “Decision Services: A Pattern for Smarter Service-Oriented Systems“. I think the conference will be great and I hope to meet some readers there but, if you are local, I have an even better offer. I can bring a couple [...]

An old colleague asked me to explain a little about the difference between Complex Event Processing or CEP and decision management. In particular he referenced a recent series of articles by James Kobelius in which the last one (titled Really Happy in Real Time) discussed how “Complex event processing empowers the contact center to manage [...]

A student of Information Systems for Business Performance at University College Cork, Ireland is  investigating how SOA can influence the IT capability of a firm and to what extent this strategy can become a major initiative for changing the underlying business approach of an organization. I offered to post the survey which should take no [...]

A reader asked me last week about how I saw business rules engines fitting in with UML, SOA and Microsoft. The article discusses whether Microsoft’s Oslo strategy for SOA will be based on UML or merely offer support for it among many standards. First, let me say that I think it is increasingly clear that [...]

I got a briefing last week from IBM as part of my researching of the IBM/ILOG acquisition (I blogged about this here). Back when I was at IMPACT it became clear that IBM was getting focused on events, rules and policies – they talked about Points of Agility, points in a business where variability is [...]

I got a briefing this week from my friends at Tibco about their Service Performance Manager product released a couple of months ago. The product is a big step along the road to what some call “autonomic computing” in that it provides dynamic and automated monitoring and correction of service levels in a service-oriented world. [...]

Well it seems that IBM believes in business rules too. I was reading SOMA: A method for developing service-oriented solutions which I found thanks to Eric Roch’s post on IBM’s SOA Methodology anda couple of things struck me: Business rules get called out explicitly both in the meta model Eric shows and in the overall [...]

Steve Cranford of PwC wrote an interesting piece called Bringing Order to Chaos (brought to my attention by Alan over at Tibco) that made me think. Steve’s focus is on the next software suite for enterprises (something he calls an Intelligent Business Performance Platform) consisting of business intelligence, business process and business rules. Reading this [...]

Earlier this week I posted Application Development 2.0 in which I addressed what I see as some of the issues with current development practices and tried to explain why I think a declarative, business rules approach is essential. This (and some blog posts around the blogosphere) made me think about the mismatch I see when [...]

I got a chance to speak with ILOG today and do some thinking so it’s time to write more about the IBM and ILOG announcement. As it is an acquisition of one publicly traded company by another neither company can legally say very much. As a result I, like everyone else, have a bunch of [...]

My good friends Larry Goldberg and Barbara von Halle have just published an interesting article: The New Frontier: BPM, BDM and SOA. It’s worth a read as it makes some good points about the intersection of BPM and decision management – whether Business Decision Management or Enterprise Decision Management.

Janelle Hill of Gartner kicked off day 2. Business Process Management is the current approach to being process-centric and part of a long history stretching back to Taylor/Deming, Business Process Reengineering and more. In particular it is an evolution from computerized process flow, to packaged applications as best practices and now flexible and adaptive processes. [...]

Neil and I are going to be speaking (on Applying Decision Management to Make Processes Smarter, Simpler and More Agile) at the Intalio User Conference on June 17th and the nice folks at Intalio have decided that everyone who attends deserves a copy of the book. While I am sure that all the attendees are [...]

Mike Gilpin and Noel Yuhanna gave a presentation on how informaton-as-a-service can help your projects and applications. Many SOA implementations were focused on transactional solutions but Forrester found that many used the same service infrastructure to expose information – e.g. a customer update service which exposes the current address also. Theme: Information-as-a-service (IaaS) offers to [...]

Ken Vollmer kicked off the last day of the event with a view from the field – a survey on BPM that Forrester did at the end of 2007. The theme is that “BPM has already achieved mainstream status inside of most enterprises but we still have a long way to go to achieve the [...]