Brainstorm Chicago April 19-20
I spent yesterday at BPM/SOA conference sponsored by soainstitute.org and bpminstitute.org. There were five different tracks going on: business rules, bpm, process improvements, soa and enterprise architecture. The target audience for
the conference were primarily business side, but there was interesting exchange
of ideas on collaboration between IT and business. A number of people narrated
stories about failed projects due to lack of collaboration. In many instances,
projects were run by technical side without full involvement of business side.
I heard excuses from business side about lack of time, it reminded some of
my own experience and some ongoing work.
There was interesting concepts introduced on Rummler’s methodology on value
chain that tries to integrate vertical division of most organizations with
processes. A lof of information seemed repeat or spinning of old ideas, e.g. BPM echoed BPR initiative of early 90s. Ken Orr contented that SOA could have
been possible in 70s. There were also some good case studies of EA, e.g.
Bill Roth from state of Kansas showed a lot of interesting work. Apparently,
government is promoting a lot of EA work.
I found most interesting session was panel discussion “SOA vs EA”. A lot of
orgnizations are vying for agility and trying to find balance between IT
governance and faster ROI delivery cycle. EA, which is more mature than SOA
can add a lot of processes that can impendiment SOA initiatives. EA folks
considered SOA ugly hack, in fact Ken Orr called it lipstick on a pig.
Though, there was not much technical stuff and being hands on guy it was a
bit disappointment. However, I got free admission due to my professional
membership with Architects Association and day off from work,
so can’t complain.