On Tuesday Steve Mills announced the new version of IBM FileNet P8 4.0. The fact that Mills himself made the announcement left no doubt to the importance IBM placed on it. In fact, Mills stated that this new release is part of a broad based strategy they are calling “Information on Demand”, which includes the management of data, information, content.

This is the first new release of FileNet since acquired by IBM in October 2006. IBM FileNet P8 Version 4.0 represents significant advances in all areas of the product. The major design goals were to support the needs of customers with large implementations, deploying to 80,000 – 100,000 users, with hundreds of millions of documents under management. Big systems. The key feedback FileNet got from customers was the need to scale. The benchmark FileNet used was 2 billion objects in the repository.

Version 4.0 supports federated data which is very important to IBM’s overall information management strategy. It supports open standards, and has a new Web-based client that provides universal connectivity to content based applications. This new version now makes FileNet integrate better with the overall IBM portfolio. P8 can now take advantage of webSphere capabilities and scalability. However, FileNet will remain open. Many FileNet customers are on BEA webLogic, which will be supported on the same tier as WebSphere. JBoss and Linux are also supported. The modeling environment has been enhanced and now supports round integration with Visio for closed loop documentation. Complex models and documents are now supported such as complex engineering.

According to Mills, “by 2010 the amount of codified information will double every 11 hours”. That’s a pretty sobering statistic. Furthermore, this information will be widely distributed, which for a typical company could mean “between 5 to 20 different content management systems and repositories”. IBM’s federated architecture is a pragmatic approach to this reality.

According to David Caldeira, VP, Platform Product Marketing IBM ECM Division, the FileNet name and brand is being kept, as well as the management. Lee Roberts, the former CEO of FileNet, is now the General Manager of the IBM Enterprise Content Management Group (ECM). ECM is part of the overall Information Management group which is approximately 3000 people. FileNet management and sales are still intact within the ECM group.

Mills' presence and presentation made it clear that IBM places importance on this announcement, and is investing heavily in ECM. The ECM development organization has 1200 engineers. The total number of customers for both FileNet and IBM ECM is over 3000. IBM ‘s current market share is 19%, which, according to Caldeira, is almost twice the market share of its leading competitor EMC Documentum. ECM is a fast growing market segment and IBM is clearly doing all it can to try and dominate it. Steve Mills put the stake in the ground this week, and the FileNet flag was waving on top of it.

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I can’t read Japanese so I have no idea how true the translation is, but it was exciting to learn that the primer I wrote with Gary So of webMethods has been translated into Japanese. This is a short, easy read that serves as a primer on the business uses for SOA and Integration, how the two are related, and the different technologies involved.

ebizQ offers on-line course based on the book called A Manager’s Guide to Integration and SOA. Coincidentally, the price on this course has recently dropped to $99. Check it out.

The English-language edition, which was first published in June 2006, is available for free as an ebook on ebizQ.

Complimentary copies of the Japanese version of the book, is also available as an ebook from webMethods’ Japanese website.

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I spoke with Greg Carter, the CTO of Metastorm about their 2007 development roadmap for their BPM platform.

What interested me is their plans to provide extensions to their Stage Action Role (STAR™) modeling notation to include BPMN. Their plain is to continue to use their proprietary STAR modeling with business users to define the business processes and then use BPMN for modeling with IT. The underlying data will tie the different models together. The concept is that you can generate different views from the same design repository.

This concept maximizes flexibility, allowing different stakeholders to use the modeling techniques they are most familiar with. This is probably better than just saying to business people – get over it and learn to read BPMN models, or alternatively, saying to BPMN modelers “learn to walk business through the model in their own words”. I’ve seen good facilitators walk business people through E-R diagrams in a way that made it meaningful in them and allowed them to provide feedback. I still think it’s possible to do with BPMN. But more troubling is the shortcomings of BPMN. We simply don’t have one modeling technique that has the capability of expressing everything necessary for a business-driven approach to designing SOA systems.

The bad news is that Metastorm won’t have this functionality until the end of the year. I’m hoping to preview it sooner. But I'm happy to hear that tools vendors are working on the problem.

Posted by bethgb in SOA Design | Permalink | Comments (1)

In creating a method for designing Web services, we started with some assumptions going in.

#1 – the method had to be business driven. More of a top-down method than a bottom up method

#2 – the should provide derivable steps to create more predictable results

#3 – the method should provide some heuristics to evaluate correctness or quality of design

Modeling is really the best and least ambiguous way of creating a shared understanding of how the business works, because the model can then be functionally decomposed into processing requirements. Instead of interpreting business requirements, the model can help IT derive the system requirement from the business description. This will create less ambiguous communications between business and IT.

Brenda Michelson’s first stab at describing the business process was a typical story board. Our first discussion was whether, you can expect business to read models. While I do not expect business to start reading models off the bat, I know it is possible for IT to walk business people through a model. I have seen this work with data models. They may not have understood the models without a guided tour, but they were certainly able to verify the models with lots of narration.

We are now testing this hypothesis by using BPMN to actually tell the business story from a business point of view. The only problem is that BPMN does not depict human processes. A BIG, BIG omission. I wonder if that has to do with the political reality of BPMN’s genesis. BPMI, the organization first responsible for creating BPMN, shared a paid administrative director with WfMC. To honor their different areas of coverage, BPMI only focused on automated processes, whereas human based processes were the domain of the WfMC.

But this is akin to the issue of having one process engine to manage human workflow and another for automated processes. In reality, most end-to-end business processes are a combination of automated and manual processes. Many automated processes require human approval or handling exceptions. We are still running the machines – they are not running us (yet). Humans need to be involved. We need a unified modeling method that depicts both.

Brenda has come up with some very nice extensions to BPMN indicating human based events, gateways and activities. Just put a little stick figure human in there. It works for me. Hope we can get the OMG people to start listening to her.

In any case, I am pretty much convinced that IT and business alignment requires a formalized communication that enables developers to derive system requirements from business requirements without ambiguity or confusion.

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