Daryl Plummer, group vice president and Chief Gartner Fellow

In this lively presentation, Daryl Plummer highlighted the changing perspective around the way systems are built, deployed and used.

Daryl started by pointing out that when it comes to adopting a technology like SOA, you need to build a case for the business value. You also need to be aware that SOA is not something you choose to do, it’s something that will be forced upon you. Why? Because the frequency and level of change in the business world is continually increasing.

If we don’t plan for this change:

• Chaos reigns
• Costs are increased
• Business agility decreases
• ‘Seat of the pants’ decision making increases

It’s not just about being quick - you need to plan in order to be agile. How does BPM help us with this? If the business processes are more dynamic, this will have a positive impact on these areas of the enterprise:

• Business agility
• Decision making
• Revenue opportunities
• Customer satisfaction
• Regulatory compliance

It’s a misnomer to talk about alignment between business and IT. It’s more a case of fusion. Another misunderstanding is to talk about SOA integration - it’s about interoperability. It’s about letting systems communicate with each other - not merging or integrating them.

So what exactly is a service? Something that abstracts the work. It lets us ask something and receive a result without having to worry about how the result was arrived at. Daryl claims that people are service-driven, using the example of how we use electricity. Once we find the socket, we just plug in our appliance and get on with it. We don’t care how the electricity is generated or which generator gives us the power.

SOA allows us to control how the services are used. Daryl uses the example of the travel plug that allows us to use a US hairdryer in the UK. This interface is the equivalent of an SOA.

There has been an evolution in the way applications are written. In the past the whole application was developed as a single unit. Now, we separate out the different parts. User interfaces are in portal or on the web. Databases have been pulled out into separate applications. Decision points have been pulled out and put in rules engines. The processes have been pulled out so business people can alter the process themselves, without having to try to communicate changes to the IT team. When it comes to the web, SOAP and WSDL allow us to link services together.

In order to make your business process-centric, you need to:

• Make sure you have a list of all critical processes
• Have a named owner for every process

Daryl went on to explain the link between events and services. The service should be constructed to respond to an event. An event is a change in the system or the state. When an event happens, I’ll do something. I’ll design in a more declarative fashion. That fits the SOA model. I can handle information that’s coming from anywhere and continue to add processes to the sytem to evolve it.

Daryl added a note of caution when pulling everything together. SOA is IT-driven. BPM is business-led. You need a process-centric stack in the middle that will tie the two together, rather than assuming that this will naturally happen.

Where will this all lead? The final stage is the agile business structure where the structure of the business can lead to innovation.

For more information and links, check out James Taylor’s commentary on this session.