BPM Library

The blog includes information from the materials that I meet during my career. It is a collection of information about methods and library sources for professionals in the IT Business Analysis sector.

SOA World Expo - Watch Out For WSO2!
— WSO2 is the ambitious two-year-old Sri Lanka start-up that's writing a complete open source middleware platform for Web Services on Intel Capital's nickel expecting it to become the standard. It says it's the same as a comprehensive SOA platform. It is looking ahead to a Mashup Server written in JavaScript this fall. It expects to have an external Web Services Registry this year and it's working on Web Service management. Then come business rules, governance and policy, security and a portal, all based on its Web Services Framework.

http://www.aero.org/education/tai/documents/ArtSciSystArchitect.pdf

http://www.opengroup.org/architecture/togaf8-doc/arch/

The Open Group Architecture Framework (TOGAF) is a framework for Enterprise Architecture which provides a comprehensive approach to the design, planning, implementation, and governance of an enterprise information architecture.

The architecture is typically modeled at four levels or domains:
- Business
- Application
- Data
- Technology

Enterprise Architecture Domains TOGAF is based on four pillars, four architecture domains:
1. Business (or business process) architecture which defines the business strategy, governance, organization, and key business processes of the organization
2. Applications architecture which provides a blueprint for the individual application systems to be deployed, the interactions between the application systems, and their relationships to the core business processes of the organization
3. Data architecture which describes the structure of an organization's logical and physical data assets and the associated data management resources
4. Technical architecture or Technology architecture which describes the hardware, software and network infrastructure needed to support the deployment of core, mission-critical applications

Architecture Development Cycle


The process is iterative and cyclic. Each step checks with Requirements. Phase C involves some combination of both Data Architecture and Applications Architecture.
Additional clarity can be added between steps B. and C. in order to provide a complete Information Architecture.


Key Phases/Steps of ADM at which Building Blocks are Evolved/Specified

TOGAF describes business architecture as follows:
“the business strategy, governance, organization, and key business processes”.

A Business Architecture describes the structural aspects of the business domain instead of the IT domain.

TOGAF dimensions:
- Scope (breadth of the enterprise or across a specific business function from end-to-end)
- Level of detail
- Time (as-is architecture vs. to-be architecture)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TOGAF

The term, Business Architecture, is used to refer to a process, model or profession. In these usages, "Business Architecture" refers to the organizing framework of a business, the documents and diagrams that describe that structure or the people who help build such a structure, respectively.

Definition:

"A blueprint of the enterprise that provides a common understanding of the organization and is used to align strategic objectives and tactical demands.”


Views:

The key views of the enterprise within the business architecture are:
1) the Business Strategy view
2) the Business Capabilities view
3) the Business Process view
4) the Business Knowledge view
5) the Organizational view

The Business Strategy view captures the tactical and strategic goals that drive an organization forward. The goals are decomposed into various tactical approaches for achieving these goals and for providing traceability through the organization. These tactical and strategic goals are mapped to metrics that provide ongoing evaluation of how successfully the organization is achieving its goals.

The Business Capabilities view describes the primary business functions of an enterprise and the pieces of the organization that perform those functions. This view further distinguishes between customer-facing functions, supplier-related functions, business execution, and business management functions.

The Business Process view defines the set of strategic, core and support processes that transcend functional and organizational boundaries. It sets the context of the enterprise by identifying and describing external entities such as customers, suppliers, and external systems that interact with the business. The processes also describe which people, resources and controls are involved in the process. The lowest process level describes the manual and automated tasks that make up workflow.

The Business Knowledge view establishes the shared semantics (e.g., customer, order, and supplier) within an organization and relationships between those semantics (e.g., customer name, order date, supplier name). These semantics form the vocabulary that the organization relies upon to communicate and structure the understanding of the areas they operate within.

The Organizational view captures the relationships among roles, capabilities and business units, the decomposition of those business units into subunits, and the internal or external management of those units.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_architecture


We strongly recommend that you first establish a set of principles for building your BPM system. This set of principles must be agreed unanimously by all major stakeholders. Take, or make, the time necessary to obtain this agreement – it is a cornerstone for all the work that follows. Remember that ideas agreed by the group are priceless in comparison with those imposed from the outside.

Such a set of principles usually includes a few high-level design heuristics and decisions. (Useful information is found in the book “Toyota Production System” and “Art of System architecting”). But the actual content should depend on the assessment of your needs with respect to the task, and it should also take into consideration the needs of the stakeholders.

1. A few definitions can be useful

2. Endorse the “building block” architectural concept from TOGAF

Building blocks, services and processes can be considered to be intimately related since in real terms
• all our services are building blocks,
• all our processes are services,
• some operation(s) of a service can be implemented as a process, and
• a process may use services for its implementation.

3. Avoid modification of shrink-wrapped commercial or freely available software

4. Danger of premature optimisation

5. Avoid the trap of the selection of “top-down” vs. “bottom-up” – use the “pinball” style

6. Explicit is better than implicit

7. The big picture

8. Horizontal and vertical coordination

9. Long-running processes

10. Avoid dispersion of the business logic

11. The importance of business events

12. BPM stakeholders’ views

13. Digitalisation of artefacts

14. Externalisation of artefacts

15. Virtualisation of artefacts

16. You may break any principle provided that you master it

Sure that any of principle is just an advice. It is quite normal to break any them if you know the reasons which are behind a particular principle and how they do match to a particular situation. For example, in the chess game is it recommended to novices do not exchange the queen vs. a pawn, but such an exchange can be a part of a combination which leads to the checkmate.

Thanks,
AS

XML - Extensible Markup Language
HTTP - Hyper Text Transfer Protocol
HTML - Hyper Text Markup Language
HTTPS - Hyper Text Transfer Protocol over Secure Socket Layer
XHTML -Extensible Hyper Text Markup Language
XSL - Extensible Stylesheet Language
XSD - XML Schema Definition
XSLT - XSL Transformation
URL - Uniform Resource Locator

WSDL - Web Services Description Language
SOAP - Simple Object Access Protocol
UDDI - Universal Description, Discovery and Integration

EAR - Enterprice Archive
LDAP - Lightweight Directory Access Protocol
TCP - Transmition Transfer Protocol
SAML - Security Assertion Markup Language
RPC - Remote Procedure Calls
RMI - Remote Method Invocation
CORBA - Common Object Request Brocker Architecture
DTD - Document Type Definition
MIME - Multypurpose Internet Mail Extention
MOM - Massage Oriented Middleware
API - Application Programing Interface
EJB - Enterprice Java Beans
SQL - Structured Query Language
GUI -Graphical User Interface

JMS - Java Massage Service
J2EE - Java 2 Enterprice Edition Platform
JTA - Java Translation API

SSL - Secure Sockets Layer

DNS - Domain Name System
ТСР - Transmission Control Protocol
UDP - User Datagram Protocol
SNMP - Simple Network Management Protocol
DHCP - Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol
RIP - Routing Information Protocol
ICMP - Internet Control Message Protocol

SCM - Source Configuration Management

ACL - Access Control List
JPEG - Joint Photographic Experts Group