I recently caught up with John Schmidt, who has recently joined Informatica as the VP, of Global Integration Services. John is also the Chair of the Integration Consortium, and is now helping Informatica define a set of best practices and services for implementing an Integration Competency Center (ICC). John stated that when Informatica polled its customers and asked what they would like to see Informatica invest in, it was in helping them create the ICC.

Now, this intrigued me because, if the truth be known, lately I've been taking the "I" off my ICC slides and just renaming it the Competency Center for SOA initiatives - the thought being that integration efforts are now being subsumed as a part of SOA, or as an enabler to SOA - but becoming less of a separate initiative. But John insisted that integration was indeed important in and of itself, and is being driven by enterprise strategies for aligning IT and Business, (and this includes SOA), and the need is to create formal governance processes and this demands and ICC, The second driver John mentioned is data warehousing and business intelligence, and the need to create a common view of the customer, or a 360 degree view of the business. These initiatives include master data management and integration. The third driver John mentioned is regulatory or other compliance issues, data security, and privacy, where the ICC becomes the center for maintaining data quality.

Must admit I had some difficulty getting my mind around the last one. The ICC responsible for Data Quality? Isn't that the realm of the data center, which most large organizations have had in place for years? But John insisted that federated data requires a centralized governance group to manage the canonical models and map the semantic meaning of data across business domains.

In my experience, data governance is more about politics than anything else - who owns the data and who can access it. And of course, governance needs governors. If no one is responsible for enforcing governance policies, how is governance going to actually be implemented? So I agree that these issues of control and governance of distributed and federation information require some changes to the org chart in order to make them happen. But what is the correct organization and what should the responsibilities of a CC be?

John Schmidt outlined core competencies he has defined as part of the practice:

1. Financial management. The ICC operates as a shared service. This is a set of best practices around charge back for shared infrastructure and individual services.
I think this capability is definitely needed for SOA as well.
2. Architecture . The ICC does not do enterprise architecture, but is responsible for the information architecture. They work with the enterprise architecture group, and "connects the dots", by mapping schemas to physical data sources to enable the translation, transformation, and integration. This ICC is the central federated repository.
I asked John what he thought about using semantic metadata to enable this instead of all the proprietary mapping techniques, and he responded that it's not a viable alternative today.
3. Business Process Management. According to John this is not BPM per se, but this includes service flow modeling, information flows, business event modeling, and common definition of business events.
Sounds to me this is more about SOA, than integration.
4. Integration methodology . The process of running an ICC, defining it, organizing it, all the things you need to run an integration group, and how it will interact with other IT groups.
5. Metadata management . The core tool is the metadata repository. The ICC group is responsible for data assets. Metadata ends up being a federated model. There are multiple repositories, and all have different views. The ICC understands the federated model and focuses on the key integration points between the different parts of the organization.
6. Modeling management . This includes techniques around canonical data modeling, what are the best practices, how do you build them.
7. Integration Systems. This is about running integration systems as a specific class of applications – all the discipline of how your manage, plan and operate the system. Formerly, when he was at the Bank of America, John Schmidt was responsible for running the the biggest Web methods integration system in the world. There was never any time when there were no transactions going through it. He said doing maintenance is like changing the tire while the car is moving. – how do you do maintenance. Changing tires on the care when it’s moving. Business rules, hierarchy of services. All needs to be managed. Integration will be a core competency and discipline.

In his book, Integration Competency Center: An Implementation Methodology, John defines different ICC models:

While I absolutely agree with John that organizations truly need to develop core competencies in integration, I think it is less clear what the roles and responsibilities of an ICC should be, and some of that depends on how organizations approach integration - whether it is a strategic initiative in itself, part of a an SOA strategy, or (as it is in most cases) a tactical solution for implementing a new business capability, as well as the model of the ICC or CC, or SOA CC.

While some of the roles and responsibilities John outlines may not all fall within an ICC, I think organizations that are seeking more agility through integrated solutions that cross existing application boundaries, need to think about these roles and responsibilities and define where they lie within the organization. Without governance we're going to to fall into the lawlessness of the wild west, and distributed, federated approaches will quickly run into problems. Governance requires governors.

So where do you fall on this spectrum? Are you building an all encompassing ICC? Are you creating different org structures? Are you experiencing the pain of having to make these decisions yet?

Posted by bethgb in Industry News • Industry Trends • Vendor Briefings | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Yesterday Lombardi announced availability of Blueprint, its on-line process modeling tool designed for business people, and offered on a SaaS basis. Lombardi also announced process definition packages to accelerate the development and deployment of processes.

I decided to hold off on this blog post this until I actually had a chance to check this out. Lombardi is claiming it’s one of the easiest modeling tools on the market. I’ve used the SaaS modeling tools from TIBCO, and Intalio, and I’ve looked at some Visio based tools. I wanted to check into this one. So here’s my first impression.

My initial question when I logged in was “where is the BPMN pallet?” I was expecting to see all the BPMN shapes up there to drag and drop. Instead, Blueprint offers two views. One is the business level discovery view which essentially has milestones and activities (business level ideas). To add decision points and loop backs, etc, you right click on a line to choose a shape. I wondered if Lombardi had read the Israeli pilots manual. There was a story (I admit I don’t know if it’s actually urban legend because I have not verified it) that a panel tried to determine best practices by the best Israeli fighter pilots. What made them so successful? The pilots only agreed to talk after they were promised there would be no recriminations. But the answer was that when they got into a combat scenario, they shut down most of the control panel to only focus on what was relevant to finding and shooting the enemy. This is the approach that Lombardi has taken. Not a lot on the pallet to get confused by, but you can go deeper by right clicking.

In the discovery view you add things like business owners, process experts, inputs and outputs, any problems (which can also be color codes), and documentation. In other words it’s the initial business view. From there, you can simply change views to the Process Diagram and get the full BPMN diagram with swim lanes. There is also a documentation view. It is fairly easy to link to sub processes and go back and forth between linked processes. I found this to be a major differentiator from other tools I’ve tried.

Lombardi also announced packages, which are built around things you would do with Blueprint. These are service offerings that include Lombardi’s BPM methodology. They announced a Process Inventory Package, a three week service offering where they will inventory all the processes in a certain area of the business to increase productivity. There is also a Process Assessment package, a 3 day service which focuses on a certain area of the business with the goal of understanding which of the detailed processes impact key KPIs and SLAs. There is also a two-week Process Analysis to detail a BPM process. These are all fixed priced service offerings.

You can go online and check Blueprint out for free, which allows you to model a few processes. The full version will allow you to import Visio diagrams, of course model more processes, export diagrams to PowerPoint, print them, provide a shared repository, and integrate with Teamworks to automate the processes.

Posted by bethgb in BPM • Industry News • SaaS • Vendor Briefings | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I'm in Las Vegas from IBM IMPACT - their yearly customer event focused on SOA. Over 6300 attendees are here. The morning started out in the MGM Arena with a marching band, the CIO of Harley Davidson riding in on a motorcycle, Cirque du Soleil acrobats swinging from long pieces of fabric hanging from the ceiling, and Drew Carey MCing and entertaining. It culminated in a improv script which had Drew Carey and Robert LeBlanc, General Manager, Global Consulting Services and SOA, IBM, navigating their way barefoot and blindfolded among 100 mouse traps. Couldn't help but wonder if it was strangely familiar territory for LeBlanc. A fun morning so far.

The major theme is Smart SOA. Drew Carey stated he had no idea what SOA is (and many in the audience around me indicated he was not alone) but IBM does it smarter. Steve Mills indicated that IBM does it smarter because of the 6550 customer implementations IBM has done. In fact the number one announcement was that IBM is the industry leader in SOA implementations. Over 272 customers speaking this week. IBM is capitalizing on and productizing this experience. Also announced was the release of 270 agility metrics 270. You can even take an SOA health check.

Another way IBM is capitalizing on the experience is by creating industry solutions. One of the solutions that has me very intrigued is Smart SOA approaches for going green. Have to wait until tomorrow to hear what that's all about.

IBM is also announcing a BPM Suite with Events Management, which includes the Apsoft acquisition. Last year IBM introduced an electronic game to teach BPM. They have introduced the curriculum into hundreds of colleges.

One of the more interesting ideas IBM is moving forward with is creating social networks to enable architects, analysts, business people, academics, to share ideas around SOA. There is a 72 hour SOA JAM going on. You can join it from your desktop.

Onto more sessions.

Posted by bethgb in Events • Industry News • SOA | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

There is a very big movement in the industry away from after-the-fact reporting and analysis to on-demand information delivered in context, what some are calling operational BI. Last year ebizQ did a virtual conference on BI in Action during which we had a panel discussion on BI and BPM, and how BI was evolving into more on-demand, operational BI. The overall message was clear. Organizations are seeking more in-depth information on-demand, within the course of business, as opposed to periodic, after-the-fact reports.

I recently spoke with Truviso about an innovative approach they have developed for delivering on-demand information in high data volume environments. As Roman Bukary, VP marketing and business development, explained it, instead of executing SQL queries against large volumes of data, Truviso analyzes the information as it moves through the pipe. It actually uses standard SQL, but can apply queries to high volume data streams, and feed dashboards with the information or even trigger data-driven actions and alerts.

The company was co-founded in 2005 by Berkley professor Michael Franklin and his assistant Sailesh Krishnamurthy, who is now the chief architect. They developed an engine that uses standard SQL queries to analyze data as it moves across systems, regardless of where it comes from. The result is massive scalability and performance, clocked at 100,000 records per second on a single machine. Additionally, thousands of concurrent queries can be run continuously and simultaneously on a single server, and the queries can be run over both real-time and historical data from within a single engine. Truviso uses open source database PostgreSQL which enables data to be optionally persisted for replay, back-testing, drill-down, bench-marking and other purposes. The system can be run distributed across applications, databases, and edge devices, allowing for massive linear scalability. The system includes integration components so it can accept data from multiple different sources, including message queues. Each connector is provides transformation capabilities.

Foreign currency trading was the first market Truviso entered. They also have solutions for capital markets, retail inventory, logists, SOA/Network monitoring, and RFID/Sensor Network.

Because it built on top of PostgreSQL, it can deploy natively on any OS or hardware platform. It can run in a virtualized environment, and Truviso is (or will soon be) available as a SaaS solution. Because it uses standard SQL companies can migrate historical reporting to real-time analysis in a matter of hours.

BI meets event processing. On demand BI. Intelligent event processing. This technology seems to span categories, as well as uses in the enterprise.

Posted by bethgb in BI • Business Intelligence • EDA • Industry News • Industry Trends | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)