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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.

Posted by bethgb at 11:17 AM in SOA Design | Digg This | Add to del.icio.us

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Posted by: Bruce Silver at February 10, 2007 01:54 PM