The Soa Iceage

‘Oh, no!’ you might think. ‘Another one who wants to shove SOA as a means for corporate agility down my throat …’.

Relax, nothing could be more wrong. In short, I am certain that SOA does not improve corporate agility, rather the opposite. The problem is that SOA represent a prevailing vision in the eloquent diction of Thomas Sowell’s book ‘The Vision of the Annointed’. A prevailing vision automatically provides a status of higher intelligence to its proponents without the need for empirical proof or more detailed analysis. Opponents simply have non-disclosed darker motives.

Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) was first proposed by Gartner Group in 1996 in a SSA Research Document as a logical evolution of losely coupled, object-oriented messaging interfaces. But many paths lead to Rome. For example, in 2000 Papyrus WebRepository as enhanced with a freely definable service adapter for HTTP and FTP and in 2001 with MQ-Series. In the following years Papyrus’ adapters were provided to support the most common messaging formats including SOAP and WSDL. Because Papyrus WebRepository is by design a state/event driven process engine with definable user front end, and it therefore provides the SOA core function – to create agile business services linked to encapsulated external services – since 2000.

Ok, interfaces are an important IT subject, but is it enough to invest in SOA? I am asking: „What can SOA do for the user?“ The answer of the SOA visionaries: “Agile processes.” I say that this is an unfounded claim with no sensible proof whatsoever. Agility is a capability of a living being that a computer infrastructure cam never posess. Agile manager and employees create agile processes with or without SOA and not the other way around.

Processes became popular in 1911 when Frederick Taylor proposed them as a means to organize a business scientifically. Rummler and Brache wrote in 1990, that ”a business process is a series of steps designed to produce a product or service for a customer.” This is an oversimplification that will only apply to at most two percent of all business processes. In ‘Reeingineering the Corporation’ Hammer and Champy enlarged on that by saying: “Not the individual task or process is important but only the outcome.” That makes a lot more sense and leads to the question: “Is it even possible to analyze rigid processes to achieve a certain business goal?” I seriously propose that this is an illusion!

It is my experience that emplyoess are inerviewed for month just to figure out a few simple processes that still are not correct once he get used. I ask: ‚How are these processes then continuously improved to finally reach the desired outcome?“ I tend to get pitiful smiles: „Obviously we use monitoring.“ Hold it, folks. Process monitoring only measures the service criteria of the analyzed process but not if it achieves the goals, right? „But we got Dashboards to monitor busines goals.“ Another one claims. True, some BPM products do, but even then it shows some value that maybe good or bad depending on the quality of the data source, but it DOES NOT tell you which process has to be changed how to get closer to your goal. You are back to square one. On top of that, you will find out that users will resist any change and a simple change needs a complete retest of all relates workflows because of the unknown dependencies.

Current BPM and SOA do not thaw the iceage that has befallen our applications. Java code is mostly frozen and thus dead. Business processes however have to be alive – call them agile if you want – but that has very little to do with SOA or what kind of interfacing technique you use. The people using those processes have to accept that it is them to create and modify the processes, which will never happen with any modelling tool that uses simplistic 2D step-by-step graphs, because of the hidden complexity. Only very innovative technology such as the Papyrus User-Trained Agent that can learn processes from user interaction, will provide the power of process tuning to the user.

Let’s take a step back. How did we do dynamic agile processes before IT? Very simple … by usng documents! So what we need most from BPM is an overview of all the states of all the documents of a particular business process. No one needs rigid processes that are monitored for inhumane perfection. Let me add one more: I propose that there are no ‚document related processes’ but if a process does not require a document then the process is not needed! Yes, some dialogs in BPM systems replace those documents but that just proves my point. In my 35 years in IT I have learned that there are no fragmented process steps, but the propagation of a process is implicitly contained in the interdependent summary state of all its content (data, documents, controls). Because content is mostly irrelevant in process analysis so many process models are either wrong, incomplete or require substantial user input.

Another subject is even more controversial. When we interview those users, how does one model their decision making into simple IF-THEN-ELSE rules? One has to know WHY a user made a decision and encode that. I propose that this is actually not possible and my proposal is based on Antonio Damasio’s research documented in his book ‚Descartes Error.’ Humans are apparently incapable of being purely rational and need emotions to come to a sensible decision. (I know that this is true for me, but then I am an entrepreneur and don’t have to be reasonable.) Human rationality as well as analytical fact is an illusion. We never know for sure and that’s why a good feel about what is going on is much better than rational decisions. Now if that is true, each and every BPM system on the market today is a waste of time and money.

Conclusion: IT and its processes lack today because of fragmentation.

This is true for IT organization with analysis, development, test and production; missing change management for SOA interfaces, process steps, rules, documents, and GUIs; as well as the chance split of BPM, CRM and ECM. To solve the above the end-user departments have to be willing and agile enough to create and tune their own processes, but they won’t succeed with 2D-graphs and rule coding. Only the Papyrus WebRepository manages all the changes from analysis, definition, and test to production, transparently across all operating systems all those process elements, including the SOA parts. A typical SOA, Java and XML application has data models and logic hidden away in the database tables, in the processes, in the Java development tools as well as in XSL, XSLT, DTD, XPATH definitions und finally in the SOA interfaces with no common change management mechanism.

Papyrus WebRepository even goes a step further. In December 2007, the User-Trained Agent will be generally available and enable the training of business processes from user interaction. The logic is much more powerful than simple rule coding because all content of the business process is considered in the transductive pattern matching learning process. The transductive training concept is patented and thus an ISIS exclusive. Yes, patenting and proprietary is good because it is innovative and functional. The time it takes to standardize kills innovation and solution orientation as the dramatically lacking BPEL 2.0 clearly shows.

Visions can’t be proven (sic), but agility mostly means to have the mental flexibility to innovate.

„There are two key areas where IT has to focus: Strategic change – including architecture, business process management and change management – and innovation.”

Barbara Gomolski, VP Gartner Group – Computerworld Opinion, October 2006

You can’t lead following in someones footsteps. IT benchmarks pull everyone down to the same low level and have no other purpose than to be a pseudo-proof for the prevailing vision.

Innovation – to do something new – always bears some risk. Be brave!

Bibliography and References:

Damasio, Antonio (2005) Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain, ISBN 0-380-72647-5

Draheim, D. & Weber, G. (2006) Trends in Enterprise Application Architecture, ISBN-13: 978-3540327349

Hammer, M. ; Champy, J. (1993), Reengineering the Corporation: A Manifesto … ISBN-13: 978-1863735056

Rummler & Brache (1990), Improving Performance: How to manage the white space … ISBN-13: 978-1555422141

Sowell, Thomas, (1996) The Vision of the Anointed ISBN-13: 978-0465089956

Taylor F. W. (1911) The Principles of Scientific Management, ISBN-13: 978-1434638205

Gartner Group SSA Research Note SPA-401-068, 12 April 1996, “‘Service Oriented’ Architectures, Part 1″

Gartner Group SSA Research Note SPA-401-069, 12 April 1996, “‘Service Oriented’ Architectures, Part 2″

E. Christensen et al., Web Services Description Language (WSDL) 1.1, (W3C) note, Mar. 2001; www.w3.org/TRwsdl

SOAP Version 1.2, World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) recommendation, June 2003; www.w3.org/TRsoap

Gomolski, B. (2006) Computerworld Opinion, Oct. 2006

Creating A Business Architecture

Many – including me – evangelize on the noble goal of creating a Enterprise Architecture before setting out on an IT project. One of the key issues with that is that the ‘Enterprise’ hardly ever acts as such. The typical enterprise is at best a federation of little fiefdoms, that more often than not are in constant political warfare against each other. That gets even worse when the enterprise has been assembled by acquisition and worst with hostile takeovers. It is highly unlikely that these fiefdom chiefs will be too happy to collaborate with other chiefs on creating a new Enterprise Architecture. Even if there is c-level buy-in and a champion has been chosen, bureaucratic resistance makes many projects falter. I am quite certain that one reason is wrong expectations set by over-hyped marketing.

Several BPM and application vendors promote the benefits of model-driven development and some even claim that they make that available to the business user (fiefdom chief). Some BPM vendors want the business user to work with a flowcharting tool and others with a requirements wiki/blog thing. This amazing business user would then ‘model’ the necessary business entities. I am sure that comes natural for most, right? This ‘ExtremlySMART’ process software would then generate the process CODE to execute those models. I have to admit that I am in awe. Supposedly that functionality – as simple as described here – ensures a dynamic enterprise with the agility to handle rapid change. Hmm? The user not only can create enterprise models and deploy them automatically but can foresee the necessary changes and how those will impact the current generated code? Amazing. A few abstract models supposedly do the trick. Astonishing. In less than three month those users make it all happen? Wow!

We propose to make much simpler features than architecture models available to business users and more often than not that fails quite miserably. So our software must be less good than our competition? I think not, it is just our marketing that is less blunt. Business users aren’t architects. They do not care about architecture. Just defining what processes one business unit needs and to get them tested takes certainly already longer than three months! Without architectural considerations. No implementation yet. Certainly not the final thing.

But I agree that the reuse and sharing of conceptual business knowledge would be the only chance to properly sell the benefits of a business architecture to business users. It has to be made visible and usable and allow them to not only participate but utilize the existing models to speed up their own implementation and deployment. Business users think in business terms, in content and what they see. Some may even think in rules. Finito. Thats as far architecture will go.

The benefits of creating a consolidated process and content driven architecture are:

Create a reusable business architecture by doing local projects that are managed in a repository Grow the applications by involving business users iteratively within the project to define content, views and processes (not models!) Utilize version controlled change management to deploy the architecture models into a scalable production environment Processes are not rigid flows that require analysis effort but are assembled by users and controlled by rules and trained patterns Enable business users to enter simple natural language business rules

For the business user the application has to look different than to the architect. It has to start with the business organization that represents effectively the role/policy definition for the actual process authorization. Data entities must be real-word plausible things that a business person can make sense of – a so called business object. Not SOA/XML data structures for the service interface. Certainly not BPMN or BPEL. The connection of the service interface to the business object (with or without SOA) must happen once by an IT expert to be reused all across the enterprise given the right authorization.

The next element to be created by business is the business content. Not documentation or descriptive text, but documents that contain relevant business data and information. There is no content without process and process without content you don’t need. (Here I go again …) Based on their authorization business users can assemble and create new business content from a library of texts and logic building blocks. These are linked to task/activity/todo and stored in a business library of processes.

To be able to work with the content the users have to be able to define their processes/cases. I propose (as you know) that there should not be any rigid processes. Users simply drag and drop content and business objects into the case. The process is owned and created by the relevant business users. Creating content outside the context of a business case/process should ideally be impossible.

Now, how can the process/case be controlled and propagated? I propose further that if you start with the right user role/policy authorization and your content is assigned the right role/policy definition for its executable methods, then many complex process definitions fall by the wayside. If only one user role is authorized to change the case state then no further business rules or decision blocks are necessary. But obviously it is possible that a fairly complex rule has to be added that controls what can or can not be done. In this case the business user or analyst can add business rules to the case model, ideally in a non-technical manner. Rules that are linked into the context of the business process are connected to it by events that trace the relationships and therefore complex resolution algorithms such as RETE are not required.

The first level of task assignment should be by role authorization and queue visibility.
If one or more users or departments share the same role assignments then automatic load balancing must take over (load, availability, priority). Rather than coding complex decision trees, decision maps, and decision tables the training if decision patterns is more efficient.
Simple time controlled state changes can ensure that service level agreements are adhered to in the process. Event listeners can trigger rules and rules can send events to interconnect object attribute value changes Rules can not only be simple IF/THEN statements but also commands and object-relational queries and searches. The context of the rule in the process and its event linkage avoids the need for conventional forward or backward chaining. Process state can simply decide whether a process requires human interaction or can run in lights-out mode. (aka straight-through processing).

Let’s  not forget that each user likes his own very special way how the workload should be presented to him/her. I suggest that the users should be allowed and enabled to freely customize their own user interface to their liking. With your typical forms, Java or Ajax interfaces that is not feasible or maintainable.

Last but not least: would it not be nice if the system could discover by itself what summary content state will drive the process state forward. I propose that this has to be the future.

Yes, we can and we should strive to empower the business user. But it has to be more than a marketing announcement. Those you will find predominantely in the BPM community. From giving away flowchart design tools to business users, to requirement wikis there are many so-called revolutionary ideas that at best are incremental progress if at all. The revolutionary ideas are found in the Papyrus Platform.

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