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Articles

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Collaborative Business-IT Architecture Realignment

Contributed by:

William Ulrich, President, TSG, Inc.

By: William Ulrich, President, Tactical Strategy Group

IT architectures are merely a reflection of what business units have been requesting for decades. As the business changed, so too did the IT environment. Unfortunately, complex and often redundant data and application architectures can no longer adapt to increasingly dynamic business requirements. Coupled with the fact that the business architecture itself may be ill suited to respond to industry dynamics, it is clear that enterprise architecture realignment must be a collaborative effort involving key business and IT stakeholders.

Case Study: Finding the Best Process for Documenting Business Processes: Counting Accountants at Sears

By: Dave Fleer, Business Process Consultant, Sears Roebuck and Co

In 2004, Sears began a series of strategic projects to improve its operational effectiveness. One of the projects was to make process improvements at the Accounting Services Center. Dave Fleer, a Business Process Consultant for Sears, helped the Accounting Services Center improve its processes.

Risk Management – Business Process Management Steps Up to the Challenge

By: Laura Mooney, Director, Corporate & Product Marketing, Metastorm Inc.

Why Risk Management is Top of Mind

Risk Management – this single objective is critical to the success of both commercial and government organizations. The need to proactively manage risk has increased in importance recently due to several factors – including high-profile business failures, government breakdowns in security and the rise in terrorism, and the increasing amounts of regulation being mandated by various governments.

Using Interviews to Document Business Processes

By: Sandra Lusk, ABPMP President, Portland Chapter

There are many approaches to documenting business processes. These include group and individual interviews, white boarding, reviewing existing documentation, and job shadowing.

Interviewing the people doing the job is an effective method to understanding how a business process is currently done. Whether you are documenting the current state or future state, successful interviews require planning, communication and a high-degree of people skills and intuition. Following are some ways to ensure that your interviews achieve the desired results.

Planning for Improved Performance

By: Stephen G. Smith, Senior Vice President & Managing Executive, Rummler-Brache Group

Most any organization will surely concede that it desires improved performance. More precisely, most organizations expect their performance to improve. However, very few organizations actually plan to enhance their performance. They simply expect it to happen as a normal course of business.

Business Process Management - What Are Your Standards?

By: Caspar Hunsche, Managing Director, Process Core Group

After speaking at a Six Sigma conference I was asked what my definition of BPM is and what differentiates it from Six Sigma. The topic of my presentation was how to identify important change programs. I am not sure what exact wording I used but I must have first stated that I am not a Six Sigma expert, only a Six Sigma customer, but Six Sigma did not seem to use standards. The BPM definition must have included process measurement, modeling and change planning. Later in my hotel room I realized I never put to paper what my definition is of BPM.

Who, What and How of a Business Analyst?

By: Anupama Sripada, Business Analyst - from a major financial institution

Who?

Business Analysts identify the business needs of their clients and stakeholders to help determine solutions to business problems. They typically perform a liaison function to software developers by serving as business problem solvers. They play a vital role throughout the project life cycle by understanding and representing stakeholder needs, documenting and organizing the requirements for a system, and communicating requirements to an entire team.

The Principles of Service-Orientation: Service Contracts and Loose Coupling

By: Thomas Erl, Author of “Service-Oriented Architecture: Concepts, Technology, and Design”

Acclaimed author Thomas Erl shares his insights into the service-orientation design paradigm by providing excerpts from his second SOA book “Service-Oriented Architecture: Concepts, Technology, and Design”, supplemented with additional commentary.

In the previous article we established the service-orientation design paradigm as currently providing us with the following eight common principles:

•services share a formal contract

•services are loosely coupled

•services abstract underlying logic

•services are reusable

Incorporating Existing Systems into SOA

Contributed by:

William Ulrich, President, TSG, Inc.

By: William Ulrich, President, Tactical Strategy Group, Inc.

You have dedicated significant resources to creating a services oriented architecture (SOA), investing heavily in hardware, software and personnel. You have trained people, hired experts, engaged vendors and deployed small scale services under an SOA framework. You have moved beyond the crawling stage and are ready to advance to the next stage of SOA deployment. But there is an elephant in the room no one wants to mention – your existing systems.

The Principles of Service-Orientation: Introduction to Service-Orientation

By: Thomas Erl, author of “Service-Oriented Architecture: Concepts, Technology, and Design”

This is the first article in an eight-part series dedicated to exploring the common principles of service-orientation. Acclaimed author Thomas Erl shares his insights into the service-orientation design paradigm by providing excerpts from his second SOA book “Service-Oriented Architecture: Concepts, Technology, and Design”, supplemented with additional commentary.

The adoption of SOA often comes with an expectation that many of the benefits commonly associated with service-oriented technology platforms will be realized simply through their successful implementation.