Category: Articles

Product data is more important now than ever before. Of course it’s always been important. It’s been the basis of all types of sales, inventory and manufacturing systems since the beginning of IT. But now, with the advent of SOA and a wide range of ever-broader business requirements, having the right product data in the right form at the right time is more important than ever before. In addition, it can’t be just any product data – it has to be consistent, reliable and accurate. For most organizations, that’s no easy task.
Let’s take a closer look at the issue of product data reliability and business needs.

Supply chains are nothing new. In fact, over the past ten years, most organizations have spent an awful lot of time making sure their supply chains are efficient. In many cases, this meant not only automating the supply chain and building tighter electronic relationships with business partners and suppliers, but it also meant looking at supply chain processes and identifying areas where time, costs, or waste could be reduced.
But, as I’ve noted in my previous columns, there’s a real need for organizations to also think about their information supply chain and their underlying data, particularly when they start to implement SOA.

Over the past few years, many organizations have invested heavily in service oriented architecture (SOA) as an approach for creating a more agile, responsive and re-usable IT infrastructure that can respond effectively and efficiently to business requirements.
But as organizations continue to focus on SOA and building services that can be re-used and shared across different business processes, there’s one issue that’s often overlooked; the reliability of the underlying data.

Business process management (BPM) is a great approach for automating, managing and optimizing a wide range of business processes. But that’s the problem.
Many BPM solutions can be used to manage and optimize a wide range of processes. On the surface (and for many companies) that’s a good thing-organizations can invest in one (BPM) platform to handle both horizontally- and vertically-oriented processes. Over the past five years, most BPM products have broadened to point where they’re platforms more than products-supersized BPM, if you will-which is a very good thing.

“Plays well with others,” and perhaps sometimes, “Doesn’t play well with others,” were comments that I remember from report cards growing up, with the more negative evaluation coming the same year I spent dealing (not terribly effectively) with a boy named Thomas who spent the majority of the year following me around and imitating everything that I did. After a while, that kind of behavior can get on your nerves.
However, these types of evaluations can also be applied to enterprise BPM projects (as well as many other types of projects). The more effectively the business, IT and project participants can “play well with others,” the more likely the BPM solution will be effective and productive.

I was never much of an artist. It didn’t matter what media I used – crayons, pencils, the occasional paint-by-numbers oil paint – I simply couldn’t create a realistic, compelling or even interesting piece of art. The story in sculpture class was even worse-most of my projects devolved into awkwardly-shaped bowls or inelegant renderings of animals that looked like they escaped from some mad scientist’s Botox laboratory.
In short, in my art projects, there was a gap between the goals I set out to achieve and the work (or implementation) that I did.
Unfortunately, that same type of gap can exist when it comes to IT projects. Or business projects. Or business and IT projects-especially business and IT projects like business process management (BPM), which typically require a wide variety of involvement from different IT and business stakeholders

In the past few columns I talked about SOA governance, specifically, why we need it and why it’s so hard. In this week’s column I wanted to look a little more closely at what it takes to implement a good SOA governance strategy.

Recently, I moderated an ebizQ Webinar featuring Ann Manes Thomas from The Burton Group and Ed Horst from Amberpoint. The focus of the Webinar was governance and SOA.
There were so many great topics discussed during the Webinar that I thought it made sense to spend some time exploring them in greater detail and raise some additional points not covered.

I like doing things right; It’s extremely satisfying when you know you’ve accomplished a task successfully, and have done so in a way that will stand the test of time.
The problem is, I don’t always do things right. Sometimes I don’t have time to do something right. Other times I’m not sure I know the right way to do something, so I make up a solution as I go along. Or perhaps I simply think that this time, there’s no one watching me, so it doesn’t make a difference how I do it. It won’t matter, as long as it gets done.