This is the third article in our series on next-generation
enterprise IT, produced in association with IBM. There is also an
accompanying podcast on BPM and SOA for business
agility.
Translating business needs into software outcomes has long been
an Achilles heel for the IT industry. Whether the approach has been
to write bespoke applications or find a best-fit package, the
result is normally an imperfect reflection of what was required.
More seriously, the resulting systems are a static reflection of
the needs of a particular moment in time. The weakness of this
approach comes when a business needs to radically alter the way it
operates, whether in response to changing market conditions or
simply a desire to reinvent itself. When the systems that
supposedly support the business can't be changed in a timely or
cost-effective enough way to make that change happen, the business
finds itself set in electronic concrete.
Many businesses have adopted the tools of
business process management (BPM) to get a handle on how their
business operates and to automate many key processes: the ease with
which this allows businesses to streamline or upgrade processes
only brings into focus the inability of systems to respond. This is
where
service oriented architecture (SOA) comes in: creating IT
assets in such a way that they can flexibly respond to changing
business needs.
"BPM is the 'what', controlling whatever the business process is
designed to do," explains Gary Gomersall, IBM's SOA evangelist.
"SOA is the meat of how you drive towards that business
outcome."
The term evangelist is not hyperbole. IBM has just completed a
10-day, 100-city world tour to spread the word about SOA, a sign of
its determination to push it as an approach that offers real
business benefits. And the key to unlock those benefits is BPM.
"The whole basis of the link between BPM and SOA is the need to
focus on specific business outcomes," says Gomersall, adding that
the benefits of SOA can be grouped for this purpose into five
areas: business flexibility, better business practices, easier
integration, re-use of assets and reduction of risk. For Gomersall
the combination of the two approaches gets us nearer the Holy Grail
of IT in business: the ability to have real business policy
statements translate automatically into outcomes delivered by IT
systems.
"Invoking BPM though SOA means you can externalise the ability
to set business policies and rules at business level language," he
says.
Where business processes touch systems they can be thought of as
invoking a service: where the systems are actually constructed as
services it allows those services to be invoked by many different
processes.
This has clear implications for business flexibility, but this
doesn't mean that every IT system has to be rewritten as a cluster
of services.
"You can turn every IT operation into a service but it's
probably not valuable," says Gomersall. "Find out what business
outcomes you need: easier integration, for instance."
IBM calls this approach Smart SOA and has defined a number of
entry points from which organisations can begin to build an SOA
strategy - connectivity or the desire to reuse assets, for
example.
The problem with SOA is that an awful lot of the IT installed
base simply isn't built that way: integration efforts that look
good at the business level simply get bogged down in systems which
can share data but little else.
"Early enterprise application integration (EAI) products had the
capacity to link at the business process level but because there
were no standards they never got beyond the data," says David
Nichols, Accenture's lead for SOA.
"In ERP implementations you get bogged down in the 'system of
record': you had to log on to a system to access a business process
and every system had that locked down."
Service orientation was - and to a certain extent still is - in
danger of being relegated to a way of integrating systems.
"A lot of people were forced into that," says Nichols. "But now
we can move further up the stack and integrate at the business
process level."
Service oriented approaches have gained a boost from two very
different directions: the need of organisations to build highly
customised applications and conversely the rise of "through the
wall" vendors who sell software-as-a-service".
"Custom applications are wide open: if you're going to build an
application you want to build it with the best services so that
it's easier to maintain, easier to change," says Nichols. "While
software-as-service products such as Workday and Salesorce.com are
designed to accommodate a particular business purpose but are
flexible enough that you can use parts of them for other
purposes."
This leaves traditional ERP vendors with a conundrum:
"Do they go along with SOA or resist it?" asks Nichols. "If they
go along with it they risk giving up their 'secret sauce', or they
can resist and find the boat has left without them? Before SAO and
Oracle there were other products that didn't survive because they
couldn't move with the market. They're taking very careful steps
but even the major ERP vendors are re-architecting their
products."
Nichols says that underpinning BPM with SOA is gaining a lot of
mileage with government departments.
"A lot of government agencies are buying into this because they
know that their business processes will have to change -
administrations will change, demographics will change, the economy
will change," he says. "They know they may have to employ new
things to accommodate these changes, therefore they want to build
something that is much easier to change."
BPM/SOA offers clear advantages to businesses needing to adapt
their business processes or create new ones. Rourke McNamara,
director of product marketing, Tibco Software, estimates that one
client - a European telecommunications company - was able to add
broadband to its offering much faster through this approach.
"They'd already used the SOA approach in their existing
fixed-line and mobile businesses, and decided to adopt a full BPM
approach to their next business," he says. "They were able to build
it 60% faster trough the ease of integration and they were roughly
twice as fast to market in provisioning new customers by using BPM
on top of SOA."
But, McNamara says, the company also gained the ability to
adjust its business processes to deal with unusual events, such as
the sudden availability of extra service personnel.
The addition of "complex event processing" (CEP) technologies to
the BPM SOA mix takes the concept of business agility to new
levels:
"What we try and do is take the things that happen intuitively
and automatically for the best 10% of their employees and make the
actions of those folk part of the underlying logic of the system,"
says McNamara.
This is many ways a reversal of the previous logic of process
automation:
"In the early evolution of BPM we took the things that were
'brain-dead" and automated them so that people wouldn't have to do
them," says Rourke. "Then when we wanted to ensure customers had a
consistent experience we in effect dumbed them down, everyone had
to operate at the level of the average. Now we're taking the
intelligence of the best people we have and building it into the
process."
McNamara cites the example of Con-Way, a truck company in the
US: "The best truckers would monitor the weather and the traffic
and change their routes but not everybody did that," he says. "Now
they use the system to send advice to truck drivers on weather and
traffic."
Not only that, but the system will also monitor when a package,
despite everything, is not going to reach its destination on time
and alert an agent to contact the customer.
This modelling of an alert employee has been employed by gaming
chain Harris Casinos in an attempt to recreate the days when it was
a single casino whose staff knew all the customers personally.
"Through their loyalty card they know when each customer is at
their limit, the point where they won't lose any more money," says
McNamara. "At that point the system investigates what free
inventory the casino can offer - seats at shows for instance - and
will send out an agent to talk to that customer and offer them free
tickets."
This extremely dynamic use of BPM and SOA is rare, but McNamara
sees it becoming much more widely adopted - in airlines for
example, which he describes drily as "an event-rich
environment".
The future of SOA seems to be in the balance at the moment -
IBM's tour clearly recognises that it needs grass roots support
more than vendor push, and will disturb some deeply entrenched
hierarchies. As Accenture's Nichols notes, it can even be seen as a
threat to companies like his own. Ultimately, he says, BPM and SOA
need each other to be successful, otherwise they will be relegated
just as enterprise integration was.
"And that would be a shame," he says.