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Architecture
Guest Blog: Mendel Koerts on SAP BPM and eSOA
With the annual Sapphire event about to close in Berlin and my dear company being honoured with SAP's Pinnacle Award, it seems nothing more than appropriate to highlight some key insights of SAP's yearly business show case. And why not get it right from the experts? My colleague Mendel Koerts, who has been instrumental in the co-creating with SAP of the Enterprise Architecture Framework (EAF) wrote an excellent piece about one of the hottest subjects discussed on Sapphire: Business Process Management and its relationship to eSOA. Mendel, the floor is yours:
Ever been to a SAPPHIRE? This huge travelling SAP marketing circus pitched its tent in Orlando from May 4 to 7 and in Berlin from May 19 to 21. This major happening attracted ten thousands of visitors and, by tradition, it was the moment for SAP to make major announcements and to launch new products. One of this year’s spotlighted products is SAP NetWeaver BPM.
Somehow the ‘S’ of ‘Suite’ or ‘System’ fell off along the way, I suspect. In my book, Business Process Management (BPM) as such namely is a management discipline, a business thing. Quite an important one, however, since the eyes of many business types are focused on operational excellence. They’re continuously optimizing the way they manage their business processes. Naming a product ‘BPM’ will therefore undoubtedly attract attention of the business. A product that manages your business processes for you, who wouldn’t want that? And if you can have such a tool why bother about eSOA any longer? Didn’t sell to the business any way. So, the curtain falls for eSOA?
Strategy and differentiation
A lot of us place a great deal of hope in enterprise applications. After all, applications have been a great source of differentiation in the past. In a world where globalisation has firmly taken hold and we're all under intense cost pressure, everyone is searching for that edge that will push up margins or grab a little more of the market.
The poster child for this is Wal-Mart. Wal-Mart made a massive investment in a data warehouse during the early eighties (somewhere around US$110 in 1980's money), mining the data for insights into supply chain behaviour that enabled them to create the most efficient supply chain in their industry. Half the savings this delivered was passed directly to the customer in terms of every day low prices, and the rest if history. The application enabled Wal-Mart to differentiate, while the investment required (not to mention the delivery effort) was a barrier to competition. IT strategy was, effectively, application selection strategy.
Today, a lot of companies are taking a similar approach, pinning their hopes on a best of breed solution that will help them stand out from the crowd. I find best of breed to be a funny term though, as it carries connotations of being better than the rest when it really means no worse than anyone else. That application-centric approach to IT strategy doesn’t work any more.
To the Centre of the Enterprise and now back out again!
I seem to remember that the academics in the early 90s were writing fascinating papers on the need to rethink the alignment of resources through out the enterprise by using the new wonder technology of Client-Server which of course led to a whole round of investments in ERP systems. Now there is a whole new round of papers saying we got it wrong, this has not added value etc., and not surprisingly, there is Nicolas Carr, of ‘Does IT matter’ fame, or notoriety depending on your point of view right there at the front of the movement.
For a more thoughtful approach on the topic, Andrew Mcfee, of Sloan Business School, offers an evaluation of the pros and cons in his Blog titled ‘Are Enterprise Systems part of the problem or part of the solution?'
As Andrew points out using other pieces of published work from other people as well;
‘if ERP wasn’t working then business managers wouldn’t keep investing in it’. I think I would go one stage further; my view is; if you want to stay in business with your auditors you will need to invest in your ERP system.
But, this also illustrates what I see as the real issue, namely ERP is now seen as good, but standard, business practice and not as a competitive capability, the usual case of the cutting edge of technology becoming blunted with time and change. Enterprises need effective ERP systems, but not so much for the competitive edge of utilising their resources better, more just to stay in business these days. Why these days? Because rules and regulations assume that you can manage through ERP.
The competitive argument has moved from centralised understanding of resources towards decentralised optimisation of opportunities in doing business. The, so called, Front Office now being the point to focus upon as opposed to the, so called, Back Office of ERP systems. Interestingly there is a fair argument to say that technology has created both the need and the capability through cause and effect. Again Andrew Mcfee comes in with a good contribution, (if you haven’t guessed by now, yup I am really interested in a lot of his work), in which he introduces the idea of ‘de-coupling’. As far as I am concerned is another way of saying ‘loose coupled’ and therefore firmly pins this new focus to changing technology capabilities.
Now comes my own thinking; I believe that the so called ‘Long Tail’ effect is forcing businesses to enlarge their revenues, and profits, by entering more segments in more markets, and that this is where the competitive benefit of a new wave of technology lies. However, there is a corresponding impact on an enterprise in the fragmentation of its core activities, and this drives two requirements; a stable effective ERP for recording commercial transactions through Data integration, and, something new, that I call ‘Synergy Resource Planning’, or SRP. This is a horizontal layer across the business between ERP and the new optimised to differentiated Front Office where integration takes place through process. Yup it’s the SOA argument, but thought about in a different way.
The CEO acquires companies, and reorganises business operations, in order to gain the beneficial leverage across the business from the combination of capabilities. We need to approach SOA with this business driver in mind and design the differentiated element in the front office to be as ‘thin’ as possible, and gain the synergistic benefit across the business in those elements of the business process where shared orchestration will create this elusive business value.
SAP and Oracle, or Oracle and SAP just to ensure that I am not seen as playing favourites here, seem to be pretty close to this, and BEA seems to almost be saying it, but I have yet to see an open and clear statement as to what we are trying to achieve with SOA in these terms. Having advertised other people’s white papers I hope it's acceptable to mention my own called ‘Changing the Game’ that deals with this in more detail around thinking of four business layers:
- Personalise – the layer of Web 2.0 if you like
- Differentiate – the layer of optimised business solutions
- Organise – the layer of Synergy Resource Planning through correctly applying SOA
- Comply – the layer of ERP
I haven’t talked about Personalise and Differentiate in this blog, that’s a different question about the use of Mashups and Web 2.0 in the enterprise rather than a challenge to the value of ERP.
Enterprise Architects versus Business Architects
It’s the Open Group Enterprise Architects Practitioners meeting in Austin, Texas, and it’s notable for the fact that they are the group under fire, both from inside the profession and from others outside, and the cause of the fire? SOA of course! The opening speaker Dave Linthicum set the context with the remark; ‘there seem to be two groups of people out there, the world of enterprise architecture and the world of SOA. The funny thing is that those in each world think that they can do the other world’s jobs’. Get his presentation here.
This statement encapsulated the reoccurring theme in many of the sessions, and highlighted the start by the Open Group a year or more ago around effort to get better business languages for expressing requirements. Unfortunately progress isn’t good for just the reason Dave gave, the two sides seem to be struggling to get it together. The Enterprise Architects rightfully see themselves as the responsible keepers of a properly integrated cohesive IT system supporting the business, and the others…?
Unlikely Love
Sometimes, life is not so bad at all. Writing a blog-item on the balcony of a Paris hotel on a sun-drenched day in spring: doesn’t feel like a prison camp. Especially not with a panoramic view of the Eiffel tower, just a stone’s throw away. Did the Open Group have a metaphorical brainwave when they organised their next Architecture Practitioners conference at exactly this place? One would think so, with hundreds of IT-architects from all over the world discussing the balance between the undeniably ugly appearance of the metal construction and the deep, mathematical drivers that inevitably had to lead to precisely this design.
IT-architects - or ‘Enterprise Architects’, I am not even going to start a discussion here - like to spend time with each other. They can occupy themselves for days with their own methodologies, abstractions and meta models, often refreshingly far removed from daily reality. Introspective and unworldly: delicate qualities that sometimes seem to be firmly-embedded in the genetic material.
Yet, changes are coming.
Janet and John talk Business
Modelling. All in all it takes a degree in maths to really achieve something in this area. Even in the context of modelling business processes and organisational structures, we don’t seem to be able to get rid of the analytical halo that surrounds the persons that are doing it. Look: it’s IT people in disguise!
Even dogs and cats see right through them. I suspect it has something to do with magnetic fields. Or it may just be karma.
Despite everything, IT people persist in their attempts to bridge the worlds of information technology and business. It doesn’t always work and every time again there is this genuine astonishment that the other side is just not getting it.
Take for example Service-oriented Architecture. It is difficult enough to explain to the non-initiated what services exactly are. Let alone to clarify how to define them or – let’s go wild – actually use them in practice. And then we haven’t even touched on architecture, something that IT experts have taken for granted as an advanced concept in their profession.
Bring that to the business side. There they perceive architecture – like all normal people – as something that pertains to homes, offices and other buildings. And the translation to information systems is simply not being made, not even when IT experts try to explain the concepts in plain Janet and John language.
7 Ways to scare EAI experts (part II)
Well, it’s already a few weeks ago that we discussed three viewpoints on integration that may help to unfreeze your local Enterprise Application Integration expert. I stated that integration is actually something you want to avoid: it’s not a mission in life by itself; it’s merely a prerequisite to do exciting things in business, enabled by systems and information. If you can avoid integration and still achieve the same, do so by all means. Furthermore, it was pointed out that excellent integration tools are now available on the market, both in open source and as industry-strength, commercial packages. Don’t waste a second of your precious time building and maintaining homebrewed, non-standard solutions. Finally, I suggested to first focus on your data governance before even considering fancy projects around web services and that almighty Enterprise Service Bus.
Two weeks of time with arguments like that! You must have witnessed some changes in the behaviour of your integration experts next door. If by any change this is not the case, please have a look at four additional opening lines that are bound to help them break on through to the other side.
7 Ways to scare EAI experts (part I)
Enterprise Application Integration. Sometimes, you just can’t help associating it with a absurdist theatre play. Two EAI experts are sitting on a bench, somewhere in a deserted place. They are awaiting the arrival of someone named Godot. But Godot never shows up and the EAI experts seem to have forgotten why they are waiting in the first place. At the end, nothing has happened and nothing has changed. One expert says to the other “shall we go?“ and the other one responds “yes, let’s go”.
Nobody moves.
It used to be an art, or at least a scarce design skill, integrating all these different, heterogeneous systems, let alone knowing the ins and outs of an abundance of EAI tools and platforms. Professionals used the title ‘EAI Expert’ with pride on their business cards and established a firm street credibility among IT peers. But every now and then, some of them seem to think that their very mission in life has become integration, forgetting about both the original business rationale and the evolution of technology, systems and strategy.
They desperately need to unfreeze. And in order to achieve that, they may need to be scared a bit first. Let me introduce you to 7 opening lines to achieve that, based on many engagements with EAI experts (and suppliers of EAI tools for that matter) across many different organizations:
Just what is SOA?
The industry is buzzing with SOA being positioned as the next big thing. As with all new technological fashions SOA promises to delver better, faster, cheaper IT support than was possible before it arrived on the scene. However, all this hype seems to have resulted in a great deal of confusion around just what SOA is, and what it isn’t. Is it a new generation of middleware based on web services and the WS-* family of standards? Is it a new generation of process modelling tools based on BPEL et al? Is it something to do with enterprise architecture? Or is it just another over hyped technology?
There Is No Spoon
I guess it’s a good litmus test. When I heard Jason Weisser, IBM’s Software Group VP for Enterprise Integration, discuss the other day with 30 Capgemini software engineers and architects what the real secret is of Service Oriented Architecture, he used this intriguing sentence: “there is no Spoon”.
Is it Plato? Buddha? The Bible? Alice in Wonderland?
Well, all of that. Sort of. Jason puzzled almost the entire audience, but I was lucky enough to have two teenage kids that force me to watch every cool pop movie you can possibly think of (how’s that for a justification…). So I recognized this phrase from The Matrix instantaneously. The Matrix is a movie filled with useful quotes, including ‘Knock, Knock, Neo’, ‘Follow the White Rabbit’ and of course ‘Do you hear that, Mr. Anderson? That is the sound of inevitability’.
Mummified architects
Yes, we’ve heard it all before. A good IT or Enterprise Architect is supposed to be able to bridge the gap between business objectives and technology solutions. In order to do that, architects still need thorough analytical skills: even with (some might argue 'thanks to') service-orientation the solutions landscape seems to be more complex than ever. Clearly, there is also a need for excellent communication skills: no architecture will be successful if it is not properly discussed, explained and driven through all layers of stakeholders. And then – of course- there’s also the political skills that an architect should possess in order to carefully align all parties involved. Looks like the portfolio of a mature, experienced professional that has seen it all and indeed, not many architects are likely to come fresh from university. But is it enough to have seen it all? Or is it a good recipe for mummification?
Why couldn’t I get the airline upgrade? — turned out to be an Architectural question!
I was facing an eleven hour flight back from India after an IT Industry event, had checked in and was sitting in the lounge contemplating an uncomfortable sleepless night with others I had become friendly with over the last few days. In breezed someone else from the event who happily announced he had been upgraded to first class. Took a moment before half in joke someone said ‘give you $50 for the seat’, but it was a high enough price point to show serious interest and see if there was a reaction. Then the bidding started in earnest and it was serious, to cut a long story short, it was $500 that closed the deal.