Participants of this webinar are Beth Gold-Bernstein (BGB); Ken Vollmer (KV); and Deon Newman (DN.)

Click here to send Beth Gold-Bernstein a question -- she'll respond in this space.

BGB: Hello and welcome to the ebizQ SOA in Action Virtual Conference. I’m Beth Gold Bernstein, director of ebizQ training center and chair of the conference. Before getting started, let’s take a moment to highlight the features and functions of this trade show. The environment is highly interactive. You can chat with company representatives and other visitors, send a business card or leave a message. This conference includes virtual booths. You can visit the booths to win prizes, download literature, interact with company representatives and other visitors. After today’s presentation, we will be taking your live questions. If you have a question for Ken, click on the “Ask a Question” button on the gray console. To download a copy of today’s presentation, click the Files button. The file will appear in your briefcase and you can download it at any time. To enlarge any of the slides, click on the magnifying glass to the right of the slide.

And now, it is my great pleasure to introduce our keynote speaker this morning, Ken Vollmer, principal analyst in Forrester’s application development and infrastructure research group. Today, Ken is going to be talking about the relationship between BPM and SOA and why you should care. We would like to thank IBM for sponsoring this keynote presentation. Be sure to visit the IBM move booth directly following this broadcast. And now, I’d like to turn the session over to Ken. Welcome, Ken.

KV: Thank you very much, Beth. Welcome everyone, it’s my pleasure to be here with you today to talk about Business Process Management and SOA and why you should care about these two areas.

The agenda we’re going to be going over is I’m going to talk about the BPM perspective and then we’re going to talk a little bit about Service Oriented Architecture and then we’re going to talk about the impact of the two together. And finally, we’re going to have a section on BPM and SOA and how they relate to composite applications and I’ll finish with two or three recommendations for the future.

First, a couple of definitions to make sure we’re all on the same page. The term Business Process Management Forester refers to it as the designing, executing and optimizing of cross-functional business activities that incorporate people, application systems and business partners. On the other hand, Business Process Management Suites or BPMS’s are the integrated tool sets designed to support business process improvements. So, the first one, is the general process, BPMS refers to the tools that are used. Interest in BPM in general is very high, this is a survey that we took recently that indicated that BPM was third overall, closely behind Embedded Business Intelligence and Collaboration and interest to the IT and business organizations inside of major companies. Very high level of interest.

We also believe that BPMS tool sales are growing at more than 20% a year and will continue to do so for the next five years. Now that’s very strong in today’s environment, so the question becomes, “why are BPM tools sales so much more aggressive than many of the other categories that we looked at?” Well, there’s some good business reasons for that. But first, let me take a quick look at the different types of BPM tools that are available. Some BPMS tools that evolved from the enterprise application integration space starting in the late ‘90s and moved into business process integration and today represent the business process management functionality with a strong integration foundation.

The other category started out in document imaging and workflow spaced in the past 15-20 years and have now also moved into business process management as a separate but converging group, I think it would be fair to say. So, the two major categories are integration-centric BPMS tools and human-centric BPMS tools. Now we do have some convergence going on between these categories and I’ve listed some examples here: Tibco’s acquisition of Staffware was the first one in April of 2004. Metastorm’s acquisition of CommerceQuest, BEA’s acquisition of Fuego and IBM’s recent acquisition of FileMac. We believe that there will be more activity of this type in the future.

Now, there are several BPM drivers from the business perspective. The first of these is the quest for increased operational efficiency and effectiveness and BPM tools provide this in a number of ways yielding organizations increased productivity through less manual efforts. Compliance mandates are handled very effectively inside of BPMS tools because they can orchestrate specific actions and ensure that a specific target is obtained in a very precise way. Reductions in cycle times can also be improved through BPM tools because of the increased efficiency that we talked about earlier and this in certain sectors like manufacturing and retail result in less inventory on hand. So, manufacturing will be less work-in-progress inventory and the retail sector will be less safety stored.

Another advantage is improved customer service. In the years I have been watching the BPM space, it’s become very clear to me that the primary beneficiary of BPM efforts is almost always the end customer. The organization producing the goods and services also benefits, of course, but the primary beneficiary is the customer leading to excellent improvements in customer satisfaction. New product development is also enhanced through BPMS tools by providing improved collaboration between the planning, engineering and manufacturing groups. And finally, the last and most important issue related to BPM tools is the focus, the efforts on the process ownership and away from the functional silos that we’ve been fighting with for so many years.

Not to be outdone, there are some very significant advantages for BPMSs to the IT organization as well, such as lower cost for maintenance because of the lower level of coding involved with creating new applications or modifying applications. It actually represents a rapid application development environment for quicker response to new requirements and this is accomplished primarily through composite applications which have demonstrated consistently a 60% savings in time and costs in producing new application functionality. It also provides business and IT agility through the collaboration tools that are available on both the modeling stage and also the monitoring stage to keep the IT and business units in sync and it is a new development paradigm as I indicated that is model driven development as opposed to manual coding in Java in C++ or any number of other languages. Finally, BPMS tools specifically, integration-centric BPMS tools have SOA baked into their core so it’s not a situation where you have to do SOA before you can use the BPM. In the case of the integration-centric BPM tools, the SOA and the BPM come together.

This shows a representation of where the integration-centric BPM suites have come from. And as I indicated on the left hand side, you’ll see the enterprise application integration with some basic features that were available 10-15 years ago such as process automation and that triggering data transformation and routing. In the say 5 years ago time frame, the most advanced integration solution at that point would have been business process integration tools which had all the functionality of EAI brought to the right hand side and combined with new features like support for EDI, trading partner management and B2B connectivity features and some vertical industry templates for the first time. Today, the most advanced tools are the ICBPM suites that also include all of the EAI and BPI functions plus new features like support for human work flow, sophisticated process modeling, business activity monitoring capability, portal simulation, life-cycle management and business event management and complex event processing which are two new areas that deal with optimization of events.

So, what’s different this time? If you look back 10-15 years ago, the business process re-engineering efforts that were being pushed by Mike Hammer and Jim Champy and Tom Peters, there were certainly efforts made at that point to improve processes. The problem was that the definition of the process model, if you will, was not connected to any of the rest of the process life-cycle which is shown on this chart. So, in the definition stage back then, you had something like a Visio chart or some other basic modeling tools that would model the process but that diagram was not connected to any of the rest of the process. Today, what’s different is the models that are created in the definition stage are connected to the rest of the process model. For example, you have in the definition stages, standards based graphical modeling tools that are going to incorporate business rules and simulation capability.

They create a notation that can be implemented directly in Java or converted into Java in the implementation phase. So you have a lot of the code that is generated but is generated directly from the model that was created earlier. And that’s the same code that gets executed in the execution phase inside the integration server providing automation and workflow support. It’s the same code that’s monitored by the end users by a business user dashboards in the monitoring phase. And it is the same code that therefore becomes modified when you analyze front end enhancements in the future. So, it’s a closed loop system as this indicates and for the first time what’s done in the first phase, the definition phase, is what controls all of the steps in the later stages. This is a very strong example of a connection between the digital and physical worlds which never existed in the past. So there’s a much greater chance of what is defined up front being what actually happens inside the computer system and that’s what’s different this time.

Looking at the value proposition of business process management tools, they’ve grown from early process automation efforts today a lot of the focus is on business process development and composite applications as well as process monitoring and management. And in the future, we’re going to be looking more at optimization through analytics and data driven simulation as well as the very top self healing processes and I’ve made an indication on the right hand side where business event management and CEP come into play on the business of management it is the layers 2 and 3 and complex event processing will impact mostly layers 1 and 2. These will be significant enhancements going forward that will improve in that handling inside of organizations. As you’ve seen in the last 10 years, we’ve come a long way with growing the value proposition of BPM and I suspect that in some point in the future we’ll be adding more functions on the top and go beyond CEP and BEM as well.

So, let’s take a closer look at service oriented architecture. First of all, we need to define what we’re talking about. What is SOA? It’s a style of design, deployment and management of software infrastructure and applications in which the applications are organized into modular services. Service interface definitions are first-class development artifacts. The quality of service characteristics are explicitly defined or identified right in the design. Services and business policies are cataloged in a repository and protocols are predominately but not exclusively based on web services. This is a rather technical approach to it but it basically it’s a way of saying service oriented architecture makes it possible for you to find and reuse existing artifacts that you’ve already taken the time to create.

This chart shows the representation of what the differences between the traditional way of doing application development which is the solid blue line as opposed to the technique of using service orientation to create new application functionality as it’s shown in the gold dashed line. So, over time, as you work on increasingly complex applications your costs go up and time required to implement them goes up as well. But with service oriented architecture, you’ll note that eventually you reach a point where you’re doing it for much less cost and you’re doing it faster. However, at the beginning, you will also notice that it takes more time and at higher cost to get started. That’s because you don’t have anything defined initially to reuse but as you go forward you build up a more extensive library of these artifacts that can be reused and from there on out, it becomes less expensive and faster to do application development inside a service oriented framework.

This is just a chart showing a sample, a possible approach how service oriented architecture will have an impact on outsourcing. Service oriented architecture tends to reduce the level of coding that’s required and in many outsourcing arrangements, coding is the primary thing that gets outsourced and if there’s less of that, that means that there will be less things to be outsourced in the future environment. The systems architect, the process developer and the business analyst will be more closely linked to the end users through the business process management suites capabilities and therefore would tend to be less likely to be outsourced and therefore less fungible as Thomas Friedman would say in his book about the world as flat which deals heavily with outsourcing applicability. So, what we’re saying here is that the service oriented approach of doing application development will be less fungible than the current method of doing things. This is for potential impacts on the IT impacts and is something to consider for the future.

So, let’s talk about BPM and SOA together. Obviously, BPM could be implemented without SOA because both capabilities have been available for some time. But implementations of BPM without the SOA foundation take longer; there’s more ongoing maintenance and support costs are higher and therefore your ROI is delayed. I like to make the analogy to doing BPM without an SOA foundation would be like a juggler with one hand tied behind their back. They can do some juggling but normally it’s not as effective and it’s not as fast as it could be otherwise. SOA provides a standards-based approach for implementing BPM which is more cost-effective than doing it without it.

There are a couple of links that tie BPM and SOA together and the first one is Standards which I’ve indicated in light green on this chart. You have the standards in the modeling area of business process management notation which is the design for business analysts or even possible power business users to be able to create a diagram of the process it can be imported into the code generation phase. UML would normally be used by IT people to do their development work, but again, they also produce notations that can be imported into the business process execution language or the XPDL language or even the BPELJ language which then are in the form of XML can be executed inside the execution engine. At the bottom, you see the standards of SOAP, WSDL, and UDDI, which are the standards which support the interaction between the business application and the modeling tools. So, there’s a definite link here. If each standard in these green boxes did not exist, the model-driven development in the BPM tools would not be possible and these are various levels of SOA standards so that is the primary link between the two is the availability of these standards.

Now there is another link that will become stronger going forward. This one is still in the early stages that deals with the service oriented architecture repository which will reside in the background, inside of the BPM tools and will all be used to store a number of interfaces or artifacts related to applications as shown inside of the graphic – interface specifications, new code, process and policies, security issues, process flows, semantic data links. All these things will be stored in a repository or more likely in a set of federated repositories. Now these repositories can be used to provide the business analyst role with a view in the modeling stage of things that they need to see, it will also provide the service developer a separate view that shows the things that that role needs to see and the same with the service architect view. So, it effects service on the SOA repository will provide different view to different roles in the development cycle depending on what they need to know and it’s all coordinated through the service repository. So this will help keep all of the different roles in sync as to what is going on because of a change made in one view will be reflected in the other views as appropriate.

OK, so BPM and SOA are linked. So what? What’s the big deal? Well, it will enable some things that have been goals that we’ve had for a number of years. BPS installed on an SOA foundation, provide the ability for processes to be captured as business meta data and stored in the repository. It connects the physical and digital worlds as we’ve discussed earlier through the complete unification of the process life cycle. It provides real time business process monitoring for end users for the first time and it supports optimization features in the area of business event management and complex event processing. If you take all those things together, you end up with increased business-user control and also increased IT agility. 

Now, also SOA supports business meta data repositories as we’ve discussed. So this is just a further explanation. Instead of all of the information being wrapped up inside of the applications, you can pull things such as semantic data links, process models, business rules and enterprise business services, you can pull those features so that it’s now out of the application and store them in a separate repository where they can be accessed more easily by a wide range of people. This protects your application because they become much less brittle because the changes aren’t being made in the applications, they’re being made externally where the changes can be tested easier before they’re connected back to the application so it definitely supports the concept of a loose coupling.

There’s also a dual nature for integration-centered BPM suites that we need to talk about. So, the suites in this picture represented by the stack in the middle and they were originally developed to support integration and process improvements as shown on the left hand side. However, once these tools were installed inside of organizations it quickly became clear that they were very good for supporting service oriented architecture and composite application development.

So, what do we mean by composite application development? Well, a composite application is new functionality created within a service oriented architecture that leverages existing components from existing business applications, the network artifacts, interfaces, anything of that nature. So you’re reusing pieces to make a new whole. Now the business value of composite applications is first they support reuse that enables faster delivery so data, application logic, and interfaces are available for reuse which results in a shorter return on investment. This leads directly to increased organizational flexibility and the organization becomes able to respond faster to new opportunities and threats and it also can do this at lower cost because you’re assembling and configuring the different features, you’re not coding them from scratch and it also enable loose coupling.

There’s an interesting example of an organization in the pre-composite application world or pre-BPM world for that matter, a loan specialist in the middle is interacting with customers in the front end on a manual basis but then that loan specialist would have to go to background legacy systems to capture various pieces of information they needed to evaluate the loan and also go to an external credit agency for information on the potential customer. All of this is pretty time-consuming, very laborious and, in the past, is typically required almost 4 weeks or more to get the approval to the customer. In today’s world, it is possible for the loan specialist to be on the phone or on a web site with customers that part hasn’t changed all that much. But then, instead of the loan specialist having to go and do all this background work after the fact, the loan specialist interfaces with a composite application that loads in some of the information from the customer which then triggers the business process management system to do a structured work flow which captures all of the relevant information from the background legacy applications, it also captures through an automated call to a credit agency and it also checks on any level of business meta information that might be available that could apply to this such as business rules, you know, what would the business rules be for a situation such as this. That can automatically be retrieved as well to the point where today, in this situation, a composite application and a business process management suite in the background can enable a loan specialist to come up with a conditional approval in 15 minutes. A huge difference for customers and who’s the beneficiary? Well the person who’s looking for the loan is the primary beneficiary in that we will have considerably increased the organization’s value and customer loyalty by going from a system which requires 28 days to getting an answer to a system which can them the answer in 15 minutes.

Recommendations for SOA and BPM

So, let me just talk about a couple of recommendations here and then we’ll turn it back to Beth. First, you need to overcome the skepticism. We’ve found in talking with a number of people here of the benefits of BPM and SOA are understood at a theoretical level but there’s still some reluctance for organizations to take the leap and we would say it’s good to be skeptical but don’t be so skeptical that you’ve bypassed the benefits of this technology because many organizations, an increasing number of week, are beginning to take advantage of these and they are, in many cases, you’re competitors. You need to address all aspects of the effort which include people issues, processes and tools; don’t just focus on the tools alone because that will set you up for failure if you don’t consider the other two. And you need to prepare your organizations for the new future where BPM and SOA and composite applications become the normal way of doing business. There are some pretty significant impacts on the IT organization which are fairly obvious but there are also implications on the business side where business people will have to be more actively involved with the direct day-to-day operations of your key business processes through interactions with the IT organization.

So, with that, I’m going to pass this back to Beth for the continuing part of this program.

BGB: OK. Well, thank you very much, Ken and now I’d like to introduce Deon Newman, director of WebSphere product marketing with a short message from IBM. Directly afterwards, we will be taking your live questions so be sure to stay tuned. Welcome, Deon.

DN: Well, good morning, Beth and thank you very much and Ken, thank you for your illuminating presentation. Let’s go to this next page. 

Many of the points that Ken makes here, we see time and time again with our customers. The businesses we deal with know what they’re trying to achieve and they also know exactly what is preventing them from achieving it. They’re trying to manage change, they’re trying to modify their operational processes and they’re trying to change them again and again to improve the way things are happening. They’re forcing many of the processes they have are both inflexible or, in many cases, they’re not documented, they’re not clear and it’s not clear where they can start. They’re trying to respond more quickly but unfortunately, integration challenges for the things that are, many of the ways, the different systems they have, the different applications they have, have prevented timely implementation. They’re trying to ensure compliance, they’re trying to identify problems that they have before they get out of control. But unfortunately, the long lag times and the inadequate alerts that they have, the dashboards, the monitors that allow them to know what’s getting out of line is preventing insider action. And they’re trying to enhance their overall business efficiency, they’re trying to analyze what’s going on, they’re trying to make sure that the processes or major objectives advance, but unfortunately, there’s a lack of consensus across the organization on the right purchases to start with. And so, paralysis ensues. So the companies we deal with are trying to change, as we say, at the speed of business.

Let’s go to the next page.

And, as Ken said to us, what we’re seeing is that BPM’s helping with we’ve all seen in the marketplace in many, many years is better with SOA. SOA provides a way of breaking down the processes, of having underlying services to support the way we want to run the processes. SOA allows you to design, to manage and to optimize your business processes by speeding solution building efficiency, by reusing assets you already have across the business rather than having to build from scratch. Many studies have shown that it costs almost five times as much to start building new services out than it does to leverage what you already have. And they’ve tried to have more flexibility in the way they change things so they can change it once and then proliferate that right across their organization rather than having to change things every single time, every single interface.

So, IBM has built out a very comprehensive approach to BPM that provides a way to use it at any entry point across the development cycle. And so, we’ve seen many of our customers starting at monitoring, for example, so kind of putting in place dashboards and look at how different processes are performing across their business. We see them starting from a modeling standpoint, in fact, we recommend many customers start by just modeling the processes they already have and many, many customers are doing that as well, trying to map out how the process performs today and then doing changes, simulations, looking at what would happen if I start to change this variable or that variable or move the way the process actually is going to run. So, we have very powerful modeling tools that will allow you to use that, with building simulations. We’ve also designed it so you can draw in from models you already have so your Visio models or other models that you might have built out of Aris for example. We’ve a clean handoff then to IT providing the business models from the metrics that allow you to start collaboratively developing. 

To start putting together the new process, building from the component that Ken talked about earlier. And then at the deployment platform that really allows the work flow choreography to come to life and really deliver on that process. Underlying all of that we have strong content management capabilities, both through IBM content management solutions as well as through some of the new farming capabilities that have recently become part of the IBM company. And then, finally, with a closed loop, back to the monitoring capability. So, IBM delivers the full set of integrated BPM capabilities, all provided in an SOA environment, builds on top of an ESB all of this helping you incrementally improve your process.

So, here on the final page, I give you some ways to get started. IBM offers a process improvement workshop, a free service, someone would come in, we help you get started on your process management project and it’s a very powerful workshop that will help you pinpoint which processes to focus on and how you would go about attacking your BPM projects with complete methodologies, several other sources such as process flow and maps which you can take advantage of and that are available for you to leverage in your BPM projects. Again, many of these are free and many of them have a fee as well. And finally, I’d also offer you, if you go to the IBM virtual booth after this webcast and there are many things you can leverage there: tools, white papers, there’s a BPM ROI – return on investment – tool as well. I’ve provided a web site at the bottom here which will help you find more information around your BPM projects.

Thank you very much for the time and Beth, let me hand it back to you.

Questions and Answers on BPM and SOA

BGB: Thank you very much, Deon. We’d like to thank IBM once again for support of our keynote presentation today. Now it’s time for your live questions. We’d like to remind you that you can ask a question by pressing the “Ask a Question” button and while we go to your first question, we have a question for you.

“What is your current stage of BPM adoption? Are you in the investigative stage, pilot or have you already implemented a solution?” Please take a moment to answer the poll while we go to your first question.

OK, for our first question, does BPM without SOA mean hard-wired or one-way integration? Ken, do you want to start with that one?

KV: Sure, not necessarily. Doing BPM without SOA just means that you’re going to be exposing yourself to more work in the future than you would have than if you had an SOA foundation because you’re not supporting the easy reuse of existing artifacts, if you need to modify your BPM solution so it’s not hard-wired if you don’t do it but it is much more flexible and loosely coupled if you do use BPM with an SOA foundation.

BGB: Deon, do you have anything to add to that one?

DN: Yeah, well, I think Ken made some great points during the presentation, you know the services are a really the building blocks that can help you build more flexible business processes that really allows your most simple, standardized way to use and reuse components of the process, it really allows you to update all your processes much more easily and allows to reuse those components so there are many ways it adds a lot more value than a BPM solution that’s put in place without SOA and without these services.

BGB: OK. I would like to remind our audience, we have some questions on this, the slides are available for download, just press the Files button on the gray console and it appears in your briefcase, if you look at the orange line on top you can see your briefcase and everything you download at the conference appears on that so you can get those slides. And here’s a question and I’m going to ask you as well, Deon and maybe Ken can start and we actually had some questions like this on our ESB panel yesterday. It’s about BPM and ESBs – how are they related and are they mutually exclusive?

KV: No, no they’re definitely not mutually exclusive. ESB or ESB-like features embedded in a full bodied business process management suite we believe are very critical to making the BPM suite function correctly. In the case of IBM, they have two ESBs that could be available and they would provide the connecting infrastructure to enable your BPM processes to flow within your organization and also to involve organizations on the outside of your firewall, but yes, ESB is absolutely not opposite of BPM. It’s really a foundational technology. The key point is it does not have to be a stand-alone ESB. Many of the larger vendors provide ESB features inside of their BPM suite, but that’s absolutely a key piece.

BGB: OK, Deon, do you agree with that one?

DN: Yes, completely, in fact, what I’d say is that BPM could be done without an ESB however if you want to start connecting things together and you want to start flowing across your network, you want to start bringing in key services and start leveraging those, you want them to be the backend application component, you really do need to have an ESB in place. We actually offer stand alone ESB for as little at $25,000 but we also actually embed in our process service an ESB as Ken said, many do embed and we have embedded and built our process server, in fact, on top of what is in market, the Web services and ESB get that as part of the standard process service in the way we actually package our process server capabilities. It comes in the package, it’s not an additional cost and really allows you to manage your processes in a much more effective way, it’s hidden away, you know, it’s not something that requires any sort of integration on your part essentially already built into the process server. We do have stand alone ESB offerings as well.

BGB: OK. How about the relationship with BPM and portals? Can BPM integrate with portals?

KV: Yeah, the same answer. Most BPM systems are designed to integrate with any number of other products and several of them also provide portal capability inside the BPM suite. So, if it’s not included de facto, remember the base that you’re talking about with many BPM suite solutions is a full-fledged integration engine so it’s designed to connect to other things. So connecting to a portal is not a problem.

DN: Yeah, and I think, Ken that’s spot on. Now we have portal capability built into our BPM suite but we also are able to integrate the many portal approach that you might tag whatever industry portals you’ve taken, you can include monitoring capabilities, part of your dashboard and we can integrate into any portal environment but we do also within our suite approach we do also provide portal capabilities.

BGB: OK, Ken, here’s a clarification on one of your slides. What is a semantic link as you…

KV: Ah, good question. There’s many way to phrase that. What I’m talking about here is the ability to support canonical mapping model in the inside of the BPM product where you can store cross-references for data and other types of information such as the process models. You can actually create a cross-reference that would cover the information you have in one application and link that to the same information in another application, this might be called something different than the other application so you need a cross-reference point. It started out with data only but now you can also cross-reference process models and many other features inside of BPMS products. So, a semantic data link would be a canonical data link or the ability to store a cross-reference inside the tool.

BGB: OK, now can you outline the components of a typical BPMS and does it include portals, an ESB, repositories? Is there a typical one? I’m going to ask first what you’re seeing, Ken and then I’m going to ask Deon to chime in on this one.

KV: Sure. As we talked about in the diagram there was a diverging, a bifurcation if you will, where the BPM products started from. Those that started from an enterprise application had an integration perspective, had that capability and they continue with that capability going forward to today. Over the years, many additional functions have been added such as B2B connectivity support, trading partner management, vertical industry templates and more recently, we’ve added things like human work flow, a sophisticated process modeling, business activity monitoring, support for business rules, portal support, life-cycle management tools are a key feature because as you’re building new composite applications inside these BPM suites, you need to be able to provide many of the same control points that IT organizations require. And so, there’s been a tremendous growth in functionality and that is for the enterprise application integration origin functions. 

On the other side, you have the human-centric and they started out with imaging and work flow and have added some of the other features like process modeling and business activity as well. So, at the moment, I believe, it’s safe to say that the more comprehensive solutions would be from the integration-centric side in many cases, however, there would be other situations where you’re just trying to do a less complicated work flow that required less interaction with the underlying back end applications and in those cases a human-centric tool might be fine, but I guess, the bottom answer is that there’s two different categories and the features that are in each are slightly different but we do believe that the same time that they are converging slowly to the point that within 3-4 years, there might only be one category of these.

BGB: OK. Deon, do you want to tell us a bit about IBM’s view of this?

DN: Well, I think Ken just gave a comprehensive answer to the question. I would say that when you are looking for BPM adds, the one additional thing I’d add is this is more than just software, there’s a degree of expertise that you’re looking for as well, particularly if you start looking at things like process maps and frameworks which can help accelerate the speed of the implementation. If you look at methodology capabilities, these are important things to look at as well. As far as the core suite goes, I think Ken described it very well. We believe in good strong modeling tools, strong developer tools, a deployment server and then a monitoring system. It’s critical that all of these things can, of course, link into what you already have. You know, it’s gotta link into an ESB, and a portal and part management capabilities. We provide all of those that if you already have it, you know, it’s very important that those are able to integrate and leverage the investments that you’ve already made.

BGB: You’ve opened up to our next question, just perfect. How integrated are the group of BPMS products out there? If you pick one, are they locked in?

KV: I’ll start with that, I guess. There has been a tremendous amount of work done in the area of standards that support all of the phases that you get involved in a process improvement lifecycle. So the tools are much more standards-based than they were in the past. Realistically, however, there are certain real world limitation when you start down a path, there’s a lot of things that even with the existing standards would have to be redone if you made a change. So, it is important that you give some good thought to who you pick to begin with and there are a number of evaluation techniques that you can use. We provide our wave evaluation process for this specific area. Other companies provide other techniques but you do need to give some thought to it ahead of time but it wouldn’t be the end of the world if you did decide you had to make a change.

BGB: OK. How is business rules management related to business process management? We’re seeing a lot of those converge, too. Ken, do you wan to take that?

KV: Sure, I’ll take it initially and Deon can certainly chime in as well. We see business rules becoming more integrally involved in all phases of the business process life cycle so it makes sense that the business process management suite either provide a strong user friendly business rules management tool or has a partnership with another vendor that provides that level of functionality. As you pull the business rules out of the applications to make them easier to modify and change without causing problems with the base application, you actually are enabling the concept of loose coupling that we talked about in the presentation and that is a goal so it’s one reason why business rules engines are becoming more popular. It makes it more flexible and easier to manage business logic, if you will.

DN: So, I would add to that that from a design standpoint, IBM has built a lot of the process rules capabilities into our process servers. For those customers looking for more sophisticated or in some cases niche rule requirements, we actually partner with many of the leading rules providers in the industry. A good example of this would be Ilog as an example we came to very close to with and many of the engagements and implementations that we’ve been involved with, we’ve teamed with vendors like Ilog to provide a deeper set of specialized rules capabilities.

BGB: Now, Ken, do you see BPM as the means of providing the strategy of how you would deliver SOA? For example, you need BPM to deliver an effective SOA solution.

KV: I would put it the other way around. You need SOA to deliver an effective BPM solution. However, I will also say that if, I think maybe there’s more in the question than just that. I see justification for business process management as being a very good tool to provide additional rationale for implementing SOA as well. The two really do go hand in hand and will make a huge difference and if you implement the BPM without SOA it’s sub-optimal and implementing SOA without BPM is sub-optimal. If you want the best benefits for your organization, you should do them both. Now the good news is that the more sophisticated BPM products provide the SOA baked in and so it’s not a situation where you say, “Gosh, I can’t work on BPM until we get the SOA in place”. With many of these tools, the SOA and the BPM come baked together.

BGB: OK. Most of EAI suites include BPM and SOA functionality and capability and I believe you mentioned that as well. If you’ve already implemented an EAI solution can you leverage what you have and what’s the difference?

KV: I would say it would depend to a great degree on timing. Over the last, I would say, 3 years, all of the enterprise application integration vendors have gone from a traditional application framework to the service oriented architecture framework. So, there’s been, they’ve crossed the chasm, if you will and the tools that are available today are much more sophisticated and much more capable because of that SOA infrastructure that I just referred to. If you’re on a version of a product that is not SOA based, it might be a good time to do a review of what your strategy should be. In the worst case, it should not be, again, can be an effort to move from a non-SOA to an SOA. Trying to use the same set of tools, I think, there would be some complications there, but… Deon, do you have any thoughts on that?

DN: We’ve actually evolved our BPM capabilities from a lot of the EAI capabilities we had. We’ve actually leveraged that in the build, we’ve taken the best of what we had and built on top of that, adding more, not a rip and replace sort of the underlying capabilities such as the ESB and the canonical objects that Ken referred to before, you know, the critical things that help you bring together the investments you’ve already made and help you build out the BPM implementation that you’re looking for. So, it’s actually not a written replace, you should be able to build up and take advantage of what you’ve already invested in.

KV: And, I should also indicate that most of the vendors that I’ve talked to are previous EAI vendors are now moving into the integration-centered business process management area. They do provide utilities to help you migrate it’s just I wouldn’t want anybody to think that it’s a seamless move from that old environment to the new one. There would be some work involved.

BGB: Now, Ken, how mature are the leading products with respect to the complete round trip capabilities of business process definitions, code regeneration, application deployment, etc.

KV: It’s very fortunate the timing of this because I’m just finishing a wave evaluation of the products in this space. And I would say about half of the 14 leading vendors that we’ve included in our survey, about half support effective round tripping at this point in time and those that don’t are working on it furiously.

BGB: How do you know when to extend a process within a back end application by modifying the back end application vs. using a BPM/SOA approach? Is BPM only appropriate when the process spans more than one application or to include human work flows?

KV: I would say I wouldn’t put those restrictions on it necessarily. This is something that you will work on over time. You’re not going to go in day 1 and change your whole environment to have, you know, to basically the model-driven approach that BPM tools support. So, you’ll do it selectively and in those cases where it makes the most sense and you’d have to, quite honestly, do quite a bit of thinking about that before I could provide you with any guidance. I would not say there’s no hard and fast rule about when and where to, I guess the big analyst cop out is we always say, “It depends on your situation”. But I would say then, it could be very flexible.

BGB: Now one of the things, if you don’t mind me chiming in, one of the things we’ve been talking about in terms of heuristics and BPM is that BPM provides, if you think of an SOA within the SOA and the straction layer for the business process, and, of course the business rules as well because of the rules engines that are embedded in BPM now so if you think of business processes that are highly volatile and change a lot so that you, by putting in a BPM abstraction layer you can make the processes more agile and easier to change so that’s one of heurists that we tell people.

KV: I would agree with that and that comes under the heading of identifying your first BPM project and then where do you go from there. It’s just, if someone came up with a project that required modification, that might not be the first one you’d start your BPM with, you’d have to consider other factors as well.

BGB: OK, this is a question for Deon. IBM process server embeds ESB with BPM capability, how can this integrated within an enterprise who has other stand-alone ESBs like Sonic, for example. Isn’t it redundant?

DN: Certainly not, for example, the connection its an open standards based Web services based ESB inside t he process server and in fact, it connects very, very easily in that environment. We have many use cases of multiple ESBs from many different vendors across the industry using many different applications, using and managing with these ESBs. We have several who use IBM’s message broker as well as the Web 3. ESB and many have Sonic and Cape Clear, many other vendors of ESB in the environment performing specific functions and would cross the enterprise very, very effectively. And, certainly, many of our BPM customers have other vendors’ ESBs in their environment and they co-exist and complement each other very, very well.

KV: I would add that that is a very common requirement, the ability for any ESB to work in conjunction with others that are already installed and, you know, be operated in a federated manner and that is certainly one of the requirements that you should look at when you are looking at an ESB award or a BPM product for that matter.

BGB: That’s very interesting. Yesterday, I’d like to tell our viewers, yesterday’s keynote is available for archive and Roy Schulte does show the implementations of federated ESBs and having multiple ESBs within the architecture which apparently is quite common. It is not an unusual situation.

Ken, do you see services broken down into business services, people to people vs. IT services, people to systems, system to system. If so, does BPM cover both vs. SOA just the IT services?

KV: No, business process management tools, especially, both categories, the human-centric and the integration-centric do support all three of those levels of functionality. It just depends on if you want system to system services then the integration capable business process management suite would be required for the back end functionality. Human-centric tools would not be able to provide that without partnering with another vendor. But the human to system and the human to human can be dealt with effectively by the human-centric variety of BPM tools so and you could find, very easily, and we’ve been telling our clients this for a number of years, you may find that you need more than one type of BPM product in your environment to cover specific needs.

So, that’s a classic example, if you have all three of those requirements, at this point in time, you’d need to find a vendor that has converged and we should talk about that that leads to a good area. There have been acquisitions in this market where integration-centric BPM providers have purchased human-centric BPM providers and vice versa. So, they are converging those products to provide the full range of capability that the question was relating to. Human to human, human to system and system to system and we believe this will continue. As a matter of fact, IBM has made an acquisition that Deon might like to talk about there that does exactly that.

DN: So, we do view the convergence from the effect of the both design point when we built current BPMs was to bring together the strongest integration capabilities and also very sophisticated work flow capabilities to which had an IMQ work flow product over the many years bring those together and build on those capabilities. We viewed that convergence as coming very, very fast and we recently acquired the Farmec Corporation who are leaders in the latest Forrester Wave around content-centric BPM as well because we just viewed that convergence as increasing and the need for an integrated approach providing many different capabilities and many different processes that many of you are running and driving you need to have an environment that can support all of those so we’re designing for more capabilities and deliverables that will be able to serve all of those processes.

BGB: OK. Can business process management suites represent the processes in such a way that they are understandable to the field, the actual people performing the processes? And how would you use it for that?

KV: Yes, yes, absolutely and if you consider the basis of this is the process model and with the graphical tools that are available today to create a process notation that is viewable and understandable to the business users and underneath the covers it’s connected to another view of that process that is viewable and makes sense to the enterprise architect and developer and these are all connected in the background and through the repository so everything is kept in sync if a change is made in one then it’s made in the other. Now this model is the basis for the code that gets generated and is also the same code that gets monitored when it’s executing and so the business users can have visibility right into the executing process and see where in the process, for example, a particular job that they are interested in or is very important to their department, where it stands and what the status of it is. So, it is very much linked to providing the business users visibility into what is actually happening in their process.

BGB: OK. Now, I think there’s a misunderstanding here, Ken, so maybe you can expound a little bit on how BPM uses standards. The question is “how can a business process implemented using BPM leverage SOA? Won’t it be reengineering the wheel in order to comply with the industry standards?”

KV: No, the standards that we’re talking about here, again, start with the process model and that is in the area of use UML or business process management notation to create the process model up front and some people would have even been able to use Visio with some assistance from third-party vendors to translate the Visio document into something that can be imported into the definition of the model as well. Anyway, you have a graphical notation that are standards-based. So what gets drawn using the palette with the graphical capability is that standard notation is then exported into the next phase of the process where the code is generated. So it’s one key area where the standards come into play and the other areas is when they get exported into a Bethel engine and that again is another alternative for creation of code and process orchestration.

So, those are two key standards that specifically relate. The other area is in the area of UDDI where it supports the registry which then points to a repository which provides the back end storage mechanism for a lot of the meta data, the business meta data, the process model, data definitions, security definitions, interface specifications all get stored in the repository where they can be accessed back out again. Now these rely on the UDDI standard which is developing so that’s two areas where standards are very critical in supporting business process management efforts. They’re not a hindrance at all.

BGB: It helps. Use what’s already there.

KV: Yes. Absolutely.

BGB: Now in order to map services to business processes, do we need a standard ontology of services such as what is a business service, data service, application service and is anyone working on such an ontology?

KV: Yes, I think you’ll find that this relates to the point that Deon was making earlier. There’s much more to a business process management improvement than the software. You have people issues, you also have knowledge issues about capturing the knowledge and putting into some type of ontology that makes sense and I believe IBM is one of the vendors from my perspective that has provided a lot of guidance in that area and is available to work with customers and I’ll pass that over to Deon.

DN: I guess I’d say, absolutely. And one of the, I’ve mentioned it already, one of the areas that we’re investing very heavily on is more than just providing work hard software. We really believe that to have success in the BPM stage with the projects that are going on, you know, we know this is not a new market, this is an industry that’s been evolving over the last 10 years or so and we’ve been very involved in that. We really believe that some standards around methodology, to hook up with many different elements from planning your BPM project, building out the strategy, all the way to the implementation and then the continuous improvement that will go on as you try and create more and more flexible processes needs an approach. There are many processes which I guess I’ll call them commoditized top processes that are core to the way that you run your business which, you know, not necessarily differentiated across your competitor, they’re just the way you run a bank or that you provide a particular service into the market or you run a telecom, some basic services that are required where most of that process can be provided in a template or framework or a process map and again, one of the things IBM is working with many industry associates around as to create some standardized process maps and provide some accelerators to help you get started quicker and improve the return on investment that you can get from your business process management project. We actually provide, what we call and SOA catalog where we now have over 3200 assets in the catalog which range from, you know, free all the way up to fee and, you know, there are many process maps in there, many SOA assets that, you know, you can download and use as accelerators to get you started. So, it’s an area that we think is very important, we think it’s an area which you should look at as you start evaluating different BPM providers and we think it’s one of the things that’s different about IBM’s capabilities here as well.

BGB: And, the process templates certainly will accelerate the implementations and what he’s talking about here data services, application services that service level, I believe, again, is, rather than an ontology, more like patterns and templates that companies are going to start building over time for reuse to help their application developers understand better loosely coupled architectures and then driven architectures, you know, what should this service, this pattern of the service be asynchronous or synchronous, should it be event driven and, you know, and you’ll start categorizing them by data services, by intermediary services to connect others and I believe that’s what we are going to build over time and I know IBM is investing quite a bit on, you know, on helping customers have those assets filling in. We have more questions than we can possibly answer in this session and I am just going to take one or two more before we go to the booth.

I know there was a little problem with the poll earlier, we did re-push that so I just wanted to share that with you. It looks like most of our audience is still at the investigative stage at BPM, certainly hope that this broadcast helps you in your investigation. We will, any questions that went unanswered, I want to tell you ahead of time that we will be sending them to both Deon and Ken so they could take this offline.

Now, and also, we have one question on governance and I’m going to tell you the rest of the day, we’re going to be talking a lot about governance, there are a couple more sessions on it and at 2:00, there’s a panel discussion, live panel discussion on SOA governance, so please join us then and you can ask your questions then.

Now, here’s a good wrap-up question. Ken, what is the quickest path to adopting BPM and SOA. Can you prioritize the technological implementation or maybe the process or what are you seeing there? What are you advising your customers to do?

KV: Well, I guess the first thing I would recommend is that the people in the organization need to be on the same page so it’s very critical that you get the IT and business people in the room, form a team and do some strategizing about where’s a significant pain point that we could attack with this technology. I certainly would not recommend a wholesale enterprise wide, big bang implementation of SOA and BPM. That’s guaranteed to fail. So, focus small, on an initial effort, prove out the capability and then build on your success and then move on. People will get trained during the process, you can maybe bring in some consultants at the beginning to help you but then your people should learn as you go along and then get more on your own two feet, if you would.

Then again, I would say, picking that first project can be tricky. We recommend normally that you look for something that’s of relatively high value to the organization; otherwise when you fix it, nobody will care or even know and it doesn’t provide you with any impetus for moving forward. You need to avoid high-risk projects, but still find something that’s valuable to the organization and that’s, you know, something that requires some effort for both the business and IT people to work on together.

DN: Yes, I would agree, Ken, I think the successful BPM implementation we see have started with a project that, you know, is different enough to provide a reward that, you know, the whole organization can see it and get behind the initiative and it can retain the financial support and the executive support across the organization but that is not high enough risk that, you know, it would break the project and the confidence in the potential of the technology once it moves forward and we completely agree that the beginning in finding a key project is the only way to get going here and then ensure that both business and IT are a core part of it.

One of the things that I mentioned in the webcast is the process improvement workshops we offer which are a no-fee, essentially a free service we provide where we come in and we can actually help you, you know, pinpoint potential BPM projects to get started so it’s an offer we have and something which we can talk further about with anyone who is interested. It is a process improvement workshop that aims to find that first project.

KV: There’s another issue, as well, and that relates to support of senior management team. BPM projects, in particular, tend to be very invasive on silo’d infrastructures and can be difficult to implement just because of the cultural resistance that you would encounter as you’re trying to improve processes that move across these multiple silos. In most cases, the senior management support is critical to be able to drive those types of effort because it requires some arm twisting, on occasion. So, this is a case where the initial project can provide you some visibility, it can show senior management team the results that are possible and that’s another reason why you need to make sure that it’s both high visibility and as low a risk as possible.

BGB: OK and I’m sorry, I just have to ask these two last questions. Deon, with IBM how long does it take to implement, typically, a BPM and SOA solution and can you relate that to the size of the enterprise?

DN: Well, as we’ve said earlier as far as size of organization goes, you know, we would recommend that you pick a project, one where, you know, departmental, one that expands, you know, a couple of departments, keep it small initially so the answer to that question is not necessarily, you know, a size of organization type limit. Many of these projects can get started with modeling which is something you can get going straight away, you can start by modeling processes or you can bring in processes you’ve already defined in Visio or in Neros as an example and bring them into the environment, the BPMS environment that we provide. We have had many SMB customers that have done, you know, very fast implementations, that have, you know, over several months been able to get started with a small implementation and then we have, you know, very large customers, enterprise-wide sort of customers, who’ve embarked on multiple year projects, you know, you start a year-long project, address a process which is, you know, going to change the way they actually run parts of their businesses and, you know, many of those projects, the hard bit and the long bit is actually in the cultural change and in the change of the process and the way the process operates more than the technology. The technology itself is, you know, can be ramped up relatively quickly, but these projects often require some reengineering as well when they get large scale and, you know, that can actually be far more a cultural and can be far more than the actual technology element to this.

BGB: As Ken was saying, start small and get some good winds. So, the last question, I have to ask you this, Deon, but if you can answer in less than a minute. Can you describe the WebSphere offering for BPM and SOA if we currently use only WebSphere application server what additional middleware infrastructure should be bring into our organization. So if you could just give a quick overview, that would be very helpful here.

DN: Sure, the WebSphere business process management suite has a modeling tool, the WebSphere business modeler and an executive monitoring tool so process monitoring tool could the WebSphere business monitor and then in the core of it there’s the WebSphere processor which is actually the run-time environment. All this is built on top of the WebSphere server environment that you may already have in place, it’s just a question does not required that there be the environment that you have. It’s basically those three key elements that are the core of our BPM offering. Now we’ve linked in to all sorts of other things, you know, portals and content management repository type tools and content management environments. You know, we can leverage the environments you have, the ESBs you have in place that, you know, really just the modeler and monitor environment in that process run-time.

BGB: OK, thank you. So, we are at the end of our broadcast. We would like to invite all attendees to visit the IBM online virtual booth here where you can download brochures and white papers including an ROI assessment for BPM – “Building the Business Case for BPM”. So, be sure to check out the booth and the other booths in the show. I hope you’ll join us for the rest of the day or as much of it as you can make.

Coming up at 12 is Rod Supermanium of the Ohio Board of Workers’ Compensation telling us how he built an effective integration competency center which really evolved into their SOA center as well. So, that’s a good one to hear. At 1:00, we’re going to be talking about SOA governance and at 2:00 is our SOA governance panel, so enjoy the show, enjoy the interactivity. You can chat with booth reps in the show, so it’s like, you know, it’s like being at a real conference show. Enjoy. Thank you and thank you Ken and thank you Deon.