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.

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