People, processes and systems are the fundamental components of which any company is composed. However, many organizations find that coordinating and managing these elements to achieve business objectives is an enormous challenge. This challenge has intensified in recent years, as information systems have grown exponentially more complex and the business climate has mandated that, to remain competitive, companies must act with greater responsiveness and agility than ever before.
The efforts of a large healthcare company to establish an enterprise-level business rules governance function and a BR Center of Excellence will be explained. The energy to address these ideas came from an IT-inspired BR Guidance Committee made up of business unit managers who really "got it" about rules. Members understood the potential business benefits of BRE technology but also that the potential could only be fully realized if the business (including themselves) stepped up to the challenge.
Contributed by:Tom Dwyer, Editorial Director and current Faculty Member,
BPMInstitute.org
By: William Ulrich, President, Tactical Strategy Group, Inc.
Business architecture is, as my co-chair Ken Orr has said, the “missing link” in the architecture puzzle. While our first architecture conference this past spring focused on Enterprise Architecture, we found a groundswell of support from our attendees and analysts for drilling into the specifics of Business Architecture.
By: Mike Rosen, Editorial Director, SOAInstitute.org
I'm excited to be joining the team of contributors to the SOA Institute. In my first article, I'll provide my definition of SOA and describe what I think are the key components of an SOA. You will see that I take an enterprise view of SOA.
Contributed by:Ken Orr, Founder & Chief Scientist,
The Ken Orr Institute
By: Ken Orr, Co-Editorial Director, BA Bulletin
It is hard for your organization to have an agile organization these days if your IT systems and infrastructure aren't. Enterprise Architecture and specifically Business Architecture is aimed at helping organizations become truly agile.
A couple of years ago I wrote an article entitled "The 3 faces of Enterprise Architecture".
By: William Ulrich, President, Tactical Strategy Group, Inc.
Organizations have two universes in constant flux; business architectures and IT architectures. Now a third factor has entered the mix – services oriented architecture (SOA). As organizations seek to align business and IT architectures, SOA can play a key role in streamlining this process. This article discusses how SOA helps align business and IT architectures to deliver more effective, more efficient responses to ongoing business demands – on a transitional basis and over the long-term.
9:15am 4-20-2006
SOA brings business processes at the focal point of enterprise design. In this architectural style Service Orchestration (which represents the parts built for change) provides the means for weaving services (which represent the parts built to last) into business processes. SOA adopters fixated on technology rush into defining services without understanding how the abstractions marry the technology with the business. This bottom-up design leads to ill-defined services and downplays (or neglects altogether) service orchestration, thus leaving the promises of SOA unfulfilled. SOA and Service Orchestration patterns distill expert knowledge to provide a means for framing these problems, articulating the forces at play, and making the tradeoffs explicit. This knowledge will enable participants to craft proper SOA designs and leverage the benefits of this architectural style.
What is an Enterprise Business Architecture (EBA)? This presentation will define and illustrate how the EBA is built and integrated with major strategic initiatives such as, Enterprise Architecture (EA) development and Business Process Management (BPM). The EBA is the next logical evolution in business process modeling and IT architecture integration. Used properly as a management tool, the EBA can create opportunities for improving enterprise performance and delivering value.
8:30am 4-20-2006
Aligning Existing Enterprise Architectures with Business Requirements
Defining an enterprise architecture that maps to your business requirements is a big challenge. A bigger challenge involves mapping existing application and data architectures to these requirements and creating a phased transition strategy to align existing architectures with those requirements. This session discusses how to create a functional decomposition of existing architectures, map that decomposition to your target architecture and create a phased strategy to realign existing data and applications with your strategic business requirements.
Corporations and public sector entities are struggling to find effective and efficient methods to obtain collaboration, alignment, flexibility and management of scarce resources between business and technology. Global competitiveness and economic constraints are at direct odds with organization’s plans for expansion and growth. . What is missing in many instances is a foundation for planning, investing and governing programs, on an Enterprise scale.
This session will provide direct insights for both public and private sector executives on the foundational building blocks required for enterprise wide technology architecture and program investments.
