Michael Blechar

One of the highest priority objectives of most IT organizations is to collaborate better with the business units they serve. A good place to start in fortifying these relationships is on enterprise business process improvement (BPI) initiatives, since they require greater collaboration among business users, enterprise and business process architects, and analysts and their counterparts in IT to be successful. These roles are supported by technologies that are part of an enterprise BPI reference architecture (see A Reference Architecture for Collaborative Enterprise Business Process Improvement Technologies*).

Business architects and process analysts are increasingly using business process analysis/modeling tools to collaborate with enterprise architects and to visually document requirements and pass them on to IT application development and application package implementation personnel (see Focusing Your Business Process Analysis Tool Selection*). At the same time, these models are being used to do process composition using a business process management suite (BPMS) which enables the business units to develop application solutions on their own (see Magic Quadrant for Business Process Management Suites*).

The complexity of new service-oriented architectures (SOAs) and business process management (BPM) initiatives is driving organizations to demand technologies and approaches that enable them to use more-abstract "model-driven" ways to deal with the problem; however, not all model-driven solutions are the same (see The Changing Concept of Model-Driven Approaches*). Although current technologies fall short, new collaborative platforms which are based on modeling principles are on the horizon (see Trends in Collaborative Modeling*).

Regardless of what may be in the longer-term future, new trends in IT and business process modeling methods, as well as the tools that support SOA and BPI initiatives, are changing the face of model-driven development right now (see Trends in Model-Driven Development, 4Q09-3Q10*). This includes the use of agile application development methods in concert with reusable design patterns, frameworks, technical models and pre-built software as a solution (SaaS) content (see Determining Whether OOAD or CBD Best Supports Reusable Software and Services*).

*Available to Gartner clients or for a fee

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