Michael Blechar

Having just completed as a co-author with my colleagues David Norton and Teresa Jones an updated research note (“Magic Quadrant For Business Process Analysis Tools*”) comparing and contrasting business process analysis (BPA) tools, I thought it worthwhile to once again in this blog to reiterate how critical I think the involvement of business architects and analysts using these tools are to the success of service-oriented development of applications (SODA). It is in these tools that the rules about data and process – and their sharing and governance needs from a business perspective – are defined in a way which allows data and application/solution architects and analysts to properly define agile, reusable software and data services at the right level of granularity.

The BPA tool market sits between the enterprise architecture (EA) tool market and the business process management suite (BPMS) tool market; not surprisingly, many BPA tools are sold into these markets for modelers with these focus areas. For example, different BPA tool selection teams want:

• A tool with an architectural focus, including support for models related to organizational, stakeholder and strategy issues.
• A solution that supports the integration of BP models with process assembly, workflow orchestration and optimization technologies.
• A tool that supports the integration of business processes and IT modeling tools to facilitate application development and package purchases.

The tools themselves are arguably less important than getting the business units talking about cross-organizational (re)use of data and process (though the visualization, business activity monitoring (BAM)/dashboarding and workflow simulation capabilities of the BPA tools definitely helps spur that discussion). This also means getting business architects and analysts to use new business process management (BPM)methods having service-oriented paradigms (which BPA tools support) as a “front-end” to IT design of SOA services which are aligned with business needs across processes.

All too frequently IT organizations implement a service-oriented architecture (SOA) with expectations of savings based on reuse and agility only to find that the business processes remain siloed in ways which negate much of the value of the SOA implementation. It is only when the business data and process requirements and governance become “service-oriented” across business units that the real benefits of SOA/SODA services become meaningful to the organization.

And so, in summary – if you want SOA/SODA to optimally succeed, pursue getting your business architects and analysts to use service-oriented BPM methods with process and data design paradigms enabled by BPA tools.

*Available to Gartner clients or for a fee.

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