Jim Sinur

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Jim Sinur
Research VP
2 years at Gartner
42 years IT industry

Jim Sinur is a vice president in Gartner Research after a short stint with a BPM vendor. Prior to that, Mr. Sinur was with Gartner 15 years and helped establish the BPI/BPM areas at Gartner and is considered a thought leader. His research and areas… Read Full Bio

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Policing Model Synchronization: Pros and Cons

by Jim Sinur  |  March 19, 2009  |  1 Comment

There is an age old debate about keeping logical models in synchronization with the physical implementation models. There are those that think it is a waste of time and money to synch-up models and there are those that believe that the logical models should be the link between strategy, architecture and actual implementation. Let’s examine this issue a bit here.

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Pro: Lash those models up

Logical models are a business representation of what the process owners view the process to be. Many hours have been invested agreeing to these target models, so why not keep them current and usable as a communication vehicle? They should not be viewed as “throw away” specifications, but as proper business assets that need to be kept evergreen and linked to architectural frameworks and business strategies where appropriate. It is worth every bit of effort to have an up to date model for incremental rollout and impact analysis. Anything else is heretical

Con: Only what is executing is real

Physical models are the only necessity to survive going forward because they execute and reflect reality. Why bother synchronizing them to a logical model and an enterprise architecture that can’t be kept up to date? Sure the architecture guides building the logical and physical models initially. These kinds of frameworks and models are great for specifications, but who has the time and money to keep these in synch these days? You can’t possibly keep up with the change. We could spend the money on making more useful changes to the physical models. The rest is pure overhead!

I believe that there are good points to both arguments, but I think there is a leveling issue. Models should be kept up to date at the high level and point to the physical implementations. This is usually good enough for strategy, incremental rollouts and fit nicely into architectural frameworks. Keeping models in synch at the detail level is expensive and probably not worth the effort. It’s a balance.

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Category: BPM Business Process Improvement Green     Tags: , ,