James Taylor's Decision Management

I am attending webMethods Integration World this week and blogging live from the sessions. Day 2 continued with Connie Moore of Forrester presenting on SOA. A Necessity for BPM. Connie started by discussing the move from functions to a process management approach and that BPM is a management approach (I blogged about Ken Vollmer talking about this before) and then that there is a suite of products that support this approach. Forrester had done a survey on problems with enterprise applications (which seemed to match with some of Bruce's comments from earlier) had some top responses that were interesting:

• Inadequate support for cross-functional processes
• Limited the number of process changes by being inflexible
• No visibility or insight into the process.

The bottom line is that current applications do not support the rate of change in business today nor do they support business processes - the applications are out of synch with the business. She introduced a couple of case studies around using BPM to increase capacity, reduce time to process and remove the IT bottleneck for developing composite applications. She also talked about a massive wave of retirement being an issue and I agree but only doing process modeling/management is not going to be enough. You are going to need to capture the knowledge about decision making that these folks have too.

Connie's premise is that this is a permanent shift in the way we think about systems and development and company management. She repeated a lot of the material on Forrester's view of the BPM market that Ken Vollmer (above) mentioned and then dove into SOA and the intersection between SOA and BPM. Not much new but a nice description of how SOA is about managing service assets so that they can be composited into new process-centric applications - that they are two sides of the same coin or that SOA makes BPM better. SOA, and through it the ability to manage these assets, makes development cheaper and faster. Connie talked about business users being able to change these service components but I think that also requires, as she does, a business rules approach to managing this logic.

She says that a Business Process Management Suite (BPMS) is a great technology for building composite applications or, as Forrester is starting to call them, Dynamic Applications. I have blogged about BPM Suites not being enough for agility but fortunately for webMethods customers, Fabric 7 has rules and integration as well as BPM! She went on to say that SOA is a key enabler for composite applications and that while you can build these applications without BPMS you are unlikely to. This sounds reasonable to me. I think rules-based components or decision services are a great way to provide dynamic business logic to any kind of application or process. She also quoted a Forrester customer who talked about "designing with change in mind" which I thought was a great phrase.

Connie wrapped up by giving some nice practical advice around starting with a process that has pain but not too much complexity. This provides motivation (pain) and yet has a reasonable delivery complexity and so can be done quickly enough to generate momentum. Also make sure you design with change in mind and go for incremental improvement.

I am speaking at 2:45pm on "Automating High-Volume Business Decisions within an SOA"

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