AJUG (SOA and BPM Meeting) - My Take

Rick Geneva from Intalio company presented an interesting thought on how SOA and BPM work together tonight. So SOA is IT driven while BPM is business driven. Rick's title is a Process Expert. Alot from his slides pointed some technologies that instantiate an SOA architecture like WS, ESB, JMS..you name it. But I think we missed his concrete experiences with his customers/clients that he worked with to improve their business process. Though the framework "Process Driven Development" was mentioned there were no information as to how it is executed from inception to deployment. I agree with him that Process is very important. That's why we have these different SDLC methodologies like SCRUM, Waterfall, Extreme Programming, TDD, etc. But all of these methodologies are focused on building the software products. How do you tie this up with Process Driven Development (PDD)? So shall we say PDD is to Business Team and SDLC is to Development Team?

I'm interested to know how PDD works. I wished he talked more on that part. To me PDD sounds like a 6 Sigma methodology but the only difference is 6 Sigma not only focuses on the product but to the processes as well from business processes/operations down to the smallest detail of assembly of a product. Ten years ago I was a Process Engineer and got trained for Greenbelt 6 Sigma and was certified. A project was identified and was assigned to me and used 6 Sigma methodology to eliminate or at least minimize a product defect. The rest of the Process Engineers also had their own. After my 6 Sigma project was completed I saved the company $160,000 annualy and the product which I'm assigned had a better quality and the ROI is very tangible. I have not heard of any process driven development yet that had a very tangible ROI. The question is how do you measure a business process? With 6 Sigma you have 98.5% as your confidence level, computed statistically. I've seen alot of Software Companies using 6 Sigma as their methodology for delivering products. But I have not heard any welcoming news that it worked for them. I might be wrong. But I've never seen anything published.

Rick made it clear that there's no organization responsible for setting the standards for Process Driven Development and everything is still up in the air but alot of companies are already using software products that enable them to Choreograph and Orchestrate their services that will eventually define their BPM. I guess everybody will just have to wait and see. But there's definitely a need for a standard business process management.

BPMN was also mentioned which basically means Business Process Management Notation. It's another set of notations that BAs and Developers will have to learn. UML is there and I believe its sufficient to translate a descriptive business requirement into a more readable, simplified diagram. This is the part where I don't cast my vote in. I think the reason why management and development team cannot meet in the middle is because of unclear requirements sitting on top of a thick bureaucrat who is wrapped in his own fragile ego.

For now I consider BPM as a buzz. Its just basically a workflow. Nothing more. BPEL and the like on the other hand simplfies the complexity of implementing tons of workflows. But how do you measure its complexity to use such a product? Maybe if there are 100 steps in a workflow? Or if the integration points consumed in that workflow is more than 10 then do we consider that as a complex workflow?

Its hard to quantify the workflow metrics and I'm not sure how to do it at this point. We can't just dive in into our Infrastructure and start doing workflow metric testing to establish a benchmark. Also, you might have to hire a person with a position as Workflow Expert, if they do exists, to do the job.

In the end, all the business want is to see if they get any value from BPM. How much can they $ave, how much processes can they reduce and make efficient, and how can they make their IT Infrastructure flexible to accommodate the ever changing business needs.