The Insider's Guide to Next-Generation BPM
By David A. Kelly, Analyst, ebizQ , 03/01/2004
Print this article
Email this article
Talk Back!
Write to Editor
While these types of solutions were good at triggering events or raising flags, they frequently provided no way to correlate these events to other events or to the affected business processes. With this approach, an administrator might be confronted by tens or hundreds of alarms and events, all emanating from a single but indiscernible malfunction—a single event (or perhaps even multiple events) hidden by the subsequent triggering of numerous others. Did the network go down because the message queue filled up, or did the message queue fill up because the network went down? Without some way to correlate cause and effect—both among the events themselves and between the events and the business processes—the management process desolves into a simplistic monitoring process that makes it time-consuming for administrators to detect the real business implications of problems.
In short, what’s important is to understand how XML events within the application servers and Web services affect the business processes. That is, do you have end-to-end business visibility into your XML data flows? While a number of Web services management vendors provide rich capabilities to monitor a variety of important infrastructure-related aspects of their applications, not many have focused their capabilities completely on the business-level view of XML flows.
One company that has is the Newton, Massachusetts-based Service Integrity. Started by technologists with long experience in distributed computing architectures (a number of founders worked at Open Environment Corporation, a pioneer of distributed computing solutions), Service Integrity’s SIFT is a non-intrusive Web services monitoring and analysis tool that provides visibility into XML and Web services messages. Like other Web services management tools, SIFT is installed on application servers and monitors the XML data flows and messages. But it can also be used to relate the various infrastructure events to components of the business process. For example, it can used to look across all the Web services on your application servers to see what products (or SKUs, for example) are being referenced.
What Service Integrity is offering with its SIFT product is the ability to gain visibility into the process and business flows of your XML and Web services transactions, along with the ability to analyze them quickly (it is real-time, after all…). As more and more companies deploy XML and Web services-based applications and the need for correlation between business and IT continues to increase, the need for an end-to-end business level understanding of the business processes and IT events will become a critical component of the enterprise infrastructure.
From my perspective, there’s no doubt that many of today’s BI and Web services management vendors will deliver similar solutions over the next few years, and that many enterprises will eventually be using this type of solution.
About the Author
David Kelly - With twenty years at the cutting edge of enterprise infrastructure,
David A. Kelly is ebizQ's Community Manager for Optimizing Business/IT Management. This category includes IT governance, SOA governance,and compliance, risk management, ITIL, business service management,registries and more.
As Community Manager, David will blog and podcast to keep the ebizQ
community fully informed on all the important news and breakthroughs
relevant to enterprise governance. David will also be responsible for
publishing press releases, taking briefings, and overseeing vendor
submitted feature articles to run on ebizQ. In addition, each week,
David will compile the week's most important news and views in a
newsletter emailed out to ebizQ's ever-growing Governance community.
David Kelly is ideally suited to be ebizQ's Governing the
Infrastructure Community Manager as he has been involved with
application development, project management, and product development
for over twenty years. As a technology and business analyst, David has
been researching, writing and speaking on governance-related topics
for over a decade.
David is an expert in Web services, application development, and
enterprise infrastructures. As the former Senior VP of Analyst
Services at Hurwitz Group, he has extensive experience in translating
the implications of new application development, deployment, and
management technologies into practical recommendations for enterprise
customers. He's written articles for Computerworld, Software Magazine,
the New York Times, and other publications, and spoken at conferences
such as Comdex, Software Development, and Internet World. With
expertise ranging from application development to enterprise
management to integration/B2B services to IP networking and VPNs,
Kelly can help companies profit from the diversity of a changing
technology landscape.
About ebizQ
ebizQ is the insider’s guide to next-generation business process management. We offer a growing collection of independent editorial articles on BPM trends, issues, challenges and solutions, all targeted to business and IT BPM professionals.
We cover BPM standards, governance, technology and continuous process improvement, as well as process discovery, modeling, simulation and optimization, among many other areas. We follow case management, decision management, business rules management, operational intelligence, complex event processing and other related topics. We closely track important trends such as the rise of social BPM, mobile BPM and BPM in the cloud. We also explore BPM’s use in functional areas, such as supply chain and customer management, and in key verticals, such as financial services, health care, insurance and government.
ebizQ's other BPM-oriented content includes podcasts, webcasts, webinars, white papers, a variety of expert blogs, a lively online forum and much more.
-2-
Smart Case Management: Why It's So Smart.
Data Virtualization: Putting Your Data to Work for Your Cloud, BPM, MDM, and SOA Projects
Live Discussion: Smart SOA Governance-A Look at Successful Case Studies
The Right Way to Do Data Integration for Composite Applications
How to Empower Your Business Innovators to Make the Most of Business Process Management 
Automating a Purchase Requisition Process with BPM
Pegasystems Makes Rare Deal, Buys Chordiant for $161.5m
BPM VIEWPOINT: Are You Asking Yourself the Hard Questions about BPM in Today's Economy?
BPM VIEWPOINT: Does Oracle/Sun Mean It's a Horse Race for BPM?
March 10, 2011
The sixth annual BPM in Action 2011 Virtual Conference will explore cutting-edge market developments in BPM and describe how to leverage them for improved business operation and performance. More
Date:Nov 05, 2009
Time:12:00 PM
ET- (17:00 GMT)
Date:Oct 29, 2009
Time:13:30 PM
ET- (17:30 GMT)
In part two of Joe McKendrick's recent podcast with Miko Matsumura, chief strategist for Software AG, they talk about how SOA and IT systems need to change and grow and adapt with the organization around it.
Listen Now
Phil Wainewright interviews David Vap, VP of products at RightNow Technologies, and finds out how sharing best practices can help businesses understand how best to engage with online communities.
Listen Now
Scott Hebner, Vice President of Marketing and Strategy for IBM Rational, discusses a topic on the top of every company's mind today: getting the most from IT investments.
Listen Now
In BI, this tough economy and the increasing role of Web 2.0 and MDM are certainly topics on people's minds today. WiseAnalytics' Lyndsay Wise addresses each of them in this informative podcast.
Listen Now
Deepak Singh, President and CTO of Adeptia, joins ebizQ's Dennis Byron in a podcast that gets its hand around the trend of industry-specific BPM.
Listen NowSmart event processing can help your company run smarter and faster. This comprehensive guide helps you research the basics of complex event processing (CEP) and learn how to get started on the right foot with your CEP project using EDA, RFID, SOA, SCADA and other relevant technologies. Learn More
A lot of people are talking about Enterprise 2.0 as being the business application of Web 2.0 technology. However, there's still some debate on exactly what this technology entails, how it applies to today's business models, and which components bring true value. Some use the term Enterprise 2.0 exclusively to describe the use of social networking technologies in the enterprise, while others use it to describe a web economy platform, or the technological framework behind such a platform. Still others say that Enterprise 2.0 is all of these things. Learn More
|
|
This new publication from our sister site SearchSOA.com explores workflow, business activity monitoring (BAM) and complex event processing (CEP) issues. |
|
|
