The Process Way: Business Process Management & SOA

I wanted to add another dimension to this site by bringing Enterprise Architecture in our discussions about BPM and SOA as I feel that for a successful enterprise roadmap its an essential element to consider.

One of the biggest challenges for today’s enterprise is to efficiently align their business needs to their IT investments enabling higher profits, efficient enterprise, happy customers, agile businesses etc. If we look around, businesses are constantly looking for answers like “Does my IT systems perform as per my business needs?” or “What are the systems which needs to be automated in priority considering the changing business environment?”.

Continuation of current business challenges like inefficient processes, duplication of data, redundant systems, obsolete information will result in poor productivity, complex process automation and integration issues, missed business opportunities etc. In this scenario a sound Enterprise Architecture practice will differentiate a organization with its competitors in terms of strategic advantage and an upper hand due to availability of critical knowledge points for quick decision making.

Enterprise Modeling and Architecture tries to answer some of these business issues by enabling visualization, analysis and communication of the “Enterprise” Information.

Lets first define an enterprise as a complex system consisting of people, process, information and technology working within socio-cultural boundaries to achieve the defined organizational goals.

Subsequently Enterprise Architecture is defined as a set of descriptions and modeling methods describing the blueprint of organization’s information structure; classified around a given framework, enabling the stakeholders to use it as a strategic tool for decision making and management support.

Enterprise Architectures would typically include a baseline architecture, a target architecture, and a transition plan to reach the target from the baseline. Enterprise Architecture is at the minimum documented using the following architectural models:

• Business architecture – The idea here is to document and visualize the business aspects like vision, mission, goals, strategies, underlying tactics and associate the same to the business process models, roles and business functions.
• Information architecture/Data Architecture - defines what information needs to be made available to accomplish the business mission.
• Application architecture - focuses on the portfolio of applications required to support the business mission and information needs of the enterprise. The next level of abstraction would be to identify the business components and services which can be associated to multiple applications in the enterprise.
• Technology architecture - defines the technology services needed to support the application portfolio of the business.

Key ingredients for a sound Enterprise Architecture practice would require use of:

• Standard based Modeling methodology : BPMN(Business Process Modeling Notation), UML(Unified Modeling Language) etc.
• Central Repository to store all modeling information
• Enterprise Architecture Framework : Zachman,TOGAF, FEAF, DODAF etc.
• EA tools viz. Telelogic System Architect, Aris, Casewise etc. which provides framework support, multiple method support and centralized information repository.

Enterprise Architecture and Frameworks:

Frameworks plays a crucial role in achieving a successful Enterprise Architecture practice. Aim of a framework is to provide a mechanism for Integrating, organizing and classifying the organization’s information present in various models and textual descriptions. A framework allows the users the view the enterprise information from their perspective.

The Zachman Framework:

I Keep six honest serving men (They taught me all I knew):
Their names are What and Why and When and How and Where and Who.
From “The Elephant’s Child,” Rudyard Kipling, 1902.

John Zachman is the one of world’s leading expert on Enterprise Architecture, and author of the internationally renowned “Framework for Enterprise Architecture”, which has set the standard on how an organization should develop, implement, and maintain an Enterprise Architecture.

The “Zachman Framework” is “a logical structure for classifying and organizing the descriptive representations of an Enterprise that are significant to the management of the Enterprise as well as to the development of the Enterprise’s systems”.
The Framework is represented in a matrix covering the six vital questions which an enterprise needs to ask and answer namely Who, What, Where, When, Why and How, These form the columns of the matrix. The framework is further split that into six perspectives (role based) namely Planner, Owner, Designer, Builder, Subcontractor and User allowing the stakeholders to visualize specific information without losing the overall enterprise context. The perspectives form the rows of the matrix.

The Columns (What, How, Where, Who, When, Why)

The columns represents the various aspects of the enterprise:

1. What (data) describes the entities involved in each perspective of the enterprise. Examples include equipment, business objects and system data.
2. How (functions) shows the functions within each perspective.
3. Where (networks) shows locations and interconnections within the enterprise. This includes major business geographical locations and networks
4. Who (people) represents the people within the enterprise and metrics for assessing their capabilities and performance. The design of the enterprise organization has to do with the allocation of work and the structure of authority and responsibility.
5. When (time) represents time, or the event relationships that establish performance criteria. This is useful for designing schedules, the processing architecture, the control architecture and timing systems.
6. Why (motivation) describes the motivations of the enterprise. This reveals the enterprise goals, objectives, business plan, knowledge architecture, and reasons for thinking, doing things and making decisions.

The Rows (Planner, Owner, Designer, Builder, Subcontractor and User)

The rows of the Zachman Framework defines the various perspectives of the enterprise and the various roles in the enterprise using that information.

1. Scope (Contextual/Planner view): Definition of the enterprise’s direction and business purpose. It includes enterprise’s vision, mission, boundaries and constraints. Usually these are textual artifacts/definitions providing the context for each column for e.g. the “Why” column cell will contain the business goals, performance measures for each function. The “What” would contain the various high level data classes required etc. The idea here is to identify the requirements and the external drivers affecting the enterprise and perform business function modeling.
2. Enterprise Model (Conceptual/Owner’s view): At this level more focus is towards the business and the associated processes. At each column level information is gathered with the business processes in perspective. For e.g. to answer “Why” you will define the policies and procedure for the processes, the “How” would be the Business process definition itself, the “Who” would be the roles and responsibilities for each of these processes.
3. System Model (Logical/Designer’s view): This defines the business described row 2, but in more details. At this level the logical models are defined for each row cell. For e.g. A logical data model is created to identify the data flow for achieving the business data requirements specified in row 2. Similarly logical network models are created to understand the network setup required.
4. Technology model (Builder’s view): This describes how technology may be used to address the high level needs identified in the previous rows. Various technology related decision like decision for the DBMS type to use, the network elements required, and the access privileges for the users etc. are identified.
5. Detailed Model (Sub Contractor view): As we can understand at this level its is the deployment phase where the details are low level like database specifications constrained as per the physical models, network configuration, detailed user privileges and so forth produced.
6. Functioning system (User’s View) : Here the final implementation of the various systems are depicted and its impact to the users are mapped. Information like what data is being entered by users and getting stored in the database or the actual message flow happening over the deployed network and so forth is considered at this stage. The idea is to use this information for operations management, evaluation of the systems deployed etc.
Framework Rules
Zachman provided the following rules to assist the reader in understanding the framework and its application.

Rule 1: The columns have no order. Each column represents an aspect of the enterprise, hence no specific order is required for the columns to be filled.

Rule 2: Each column has a simple, basic model. Data (what), Function (how), Network (where), People (who), Time (when), and Motivation (why). They have been provided as an abstraction of the real world.

Rule 3: The basic model of each column must be unique. Each model represent a unique concept however the models might be related to each other as they are abstractions of the real world.

Rule 4: Each row represents a distinct perspective This rule is most easily demonstrated by the Business Model, System Model, and Technology Model rows, which represent the owner’s, architect’s, and builder’s perspectives. Each perspective is different because it deals with a different set of constraints.

Rule 5: Each cell is unique. Since each column has a unique basic model that makes each column unique and each row has a different perspective, each cell in the framework is unique. Zachman doesn’t define a particular method to represent a cell. A user is hence free to represent the cell information using any available graphical depictions.

Rule 6: Combining the cells in one row forms a complete model. The sum of all cells in a given row completely defines the enterprise from that perspective.

Conclusion:

Enterprise Architecture, a shared information repository viz. “ Telelogic System Architect” or “IDS Schaer Aris” and use of frameworks viz. Zachman gives an enterprise an ability to bring the architecture to life by allowing:
• Improved quality and completeness of information
• Integration of models and textual data
• Ability to navigate the information quickly and efficiently
• Ability to analyze across architecture domains and business areas, hence …
• Better-informed management of change and improvement
• Information content and style defined by a corporate metamodel, hence no gap between the visual representation and the textual definition, hence …
• Improved communication between business, IT and other stakeholders

The ultimate goal … improved business-IT alignment

This entry was posted on Saturday, May 12th, 2007 at 6:51 pm and is filed under EA, Frameworks. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.