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BY DaviD Margulius | photographY BY Mark johann

As SOA goes mainstream in the enterprise, its success may hinge

on a crucial meeting of the minds — a mashup of talent that can uncap a font of creative potential.

On one side of the mashup are archi-tects and developers, who up to now have perhaps been designing point Web-services deployments or legacy systems wrappers. On the other side are business process modelers, who’ve been mapping out how your business

really works and what it needs, often in isolation and with limited ability to act on their process insights.

Before enterprises deploy SOA on a large scale, experts say, getting these teams together in a disciplined plan-ning exercise can unlock the business value that process modelers knew was there all along.

“I think the business process model-ers were waiting for SOA to show up,” says Sean Rhody, a chief architect at

Successful service-oriented architectures begin with process modeling and real collaboration between IT architects and business stakeholders

the CSC Consulting Group. “Without being able to define services, they were always talking at a level that didn’t connect to the actual imple-mentation at all.”

Before SOA, says Sandy Carter, IBM’s vice president of SOA and WebSphere strategy, “you could do all this won-derful mapping of processes, but the underlying technology didn’t exist to support any major changes in the process. Now IT has the technology to offer services on a business activity basis, whereas before it was on a tech-nical subtask. Process is becoming that common vocabulary that exists between the business and IT.”

And the payoff, says Forrester Research Vice President Randy Heff-ner, comes when the two groups work together to find business processes that share common services and prioritize the development of those services.

“It’s capturing business capability as reusable digital services, in a way that can be connected to any business pro-cess,” Heffner explains.

Across a range of enterprises, IT is laying the groundwork for SOA de-ployments that will have a transfor-mative effect on IT, rolling out services that various applications can share and establishing governance rule for service design and interconnect. Yet woe to those who ignore business pro-cess planning and proceed directly to architectural design.

“If you don’t factor in your business process, you really don’t have an SOA,” says Tim Vibbert, senior systems engi-neer at Lockheed Martin.

Lessons From the FrontWhat does it take to model processes successfully in an SOA context? Info-World interviewed consultants, ana-lysts, and enterprise architects and got

From Processes to ServicesSOA is a better way to do application integration, but a small SOA vision centered on integration misses the point of designing for greater business flex-ibility. The word “service” in SOA refers to business services, which capture business capabilities in digital form, making them available for reconfiguration and reconnec-tion to meet a constantly changing landscape of business needs.

To align services with business capabilities, IT must design SOA-based business ser-vices within the context of the business processes they serve. The real power of SOA comes in putting analysis of technology as well as business in a tight feedback loop that aims to improve the efficiency, effectiveness, and flexibility of business process operations.

IT shops must demonstrate that they have the business savvy to participate in business-level discussions. Beyond “talking business language” IT must “think business thoughts” in order to gain the credibility and respect needed to partner with the busi-ness, and design digital business services that best capture the capabilities needed for the future of the business. — Randy Heffner, Forrester Research

Physical World Processes

Sample process

Digital Services

Digital processes

Productinquiry

Reserve inventory

Scheduleproduction

Scheduleshipment

Createsupplierorder

Createcustomerorder

Productinquiry

Reserve inventory

Scheduleproduction

Createsupplierorder

Scheduleproduction

Service delivery network

Createcustomerorder

Services can initiate digital processes

Na

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su

ess

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an earful from those on the front lines, among them Wachovia vice president Rohn Griggs.

“We’re just now scratching the sur-face around SOA,” says Griggs, who oversees workflow, imaging, and integration technology in the company’s busi-ness process modeling “center of excellence,” a group that provides enterprise-wide ground rules and guidance.

Griggs explains that although the company started from the bot-tom up, exposing legacy apps as Web services, it’s now trying to orchestrate those services around busi-ness processes such as loan origination.

“My team is trying to stand up some shared infrastructure with SOA capability,” Griggs says. “We’re good at business process modeling, and we’re good at exposing legacy applications as Web services. Now its time to say, ‘Let’s bring the two together.’”

To do so, Griggs is leveraging his center of excellence, which sits within corporate IT and now also oversees integration. The group includes prod-uct specialists (developers familiar with modeling), process engineers (who interview business users for pro-cess-centric modeling), and a consulting organization that markets the technol-ogy to the bank’s lines of business. The bank also has a roundtable steering committee for SOA and process mod-eling, made up of architects from each line-of-business organization.

“The way we typically start a proj-ect is with a daylong kickoff meeting, including breakout sessions where we

interview subject-matter experts on their perspective,” Griggs says. Then his team gets down to work, developing process maps that can be played back to the business in a two-day validation session — including re-engineering proposals, for example, to eliminate costs or reduce cycle time.

Be prepared for resistance from the line of business when you try to map business processes as they actually are, Griggs warns. “You wouldn’t believe the amount of pushback we get. They’ll say, ‘We don’t need you to model, just do it like we tell you. I know how I do things today; I know my process is bro-ken.’” Griggs advises IT to refuse this type of engagement.

“That’s a big lesson learned for us. Validation of the as-is is imperative,” Griggs says. “It’s an eye-opening experi-ence when the business sees a process-centric view of their work. They’ll say, ‘Geez, I never thought of our process that way. Why do we staple that in the upper left hand corner? That’s the way we’ve always done it.’”

Another key is to completely ignore organizational con-straints when mapping a business process, says Griggs. “We look at how do we make it end-to- end the most efficient, stream-lined possible even if it crosses business boundaries.”

Griggs recommends working with outside consultants who can help benchmark you against other organi-zations, but not giving them too much control. “Don’t try to do it alone,”

he says. “You still need to run it as an in-ternal project. Just use the consultant’s expertise as staff augmentation.”

The Great Methodology DebateAlthough process modeling has been around for years, the combo of process modeling and SOA is still new enough that analysts and consultants have strong and often differing opinions about best practices.

IBM, which worked with Wachovia on its pre-SOA deployment process mapping, emphasizes a rigorous meth-odology called component business modeling for synching up processes with services, starting with proactively selecting the processes that will help differentiate businesses.

“Today, people are selecting the proj-ect they dive into based on their his-tory,” IBM’s Carter says. “If I’m an ERP shop, I’ll start from an ERP perspective and move out. If I’m a datacentric shop, I’ll start from my data view and move out. Only 20 percent are re-architect-ing from SOA; the other 80 percent

How to Model Processes in an SOA World Consultants, IT managers, and vendors offer a range of advice for creating the process underpinnings of a successful SOA

a�Choose the right process for initial SOA deployment based on the potential to add business value

aIgnore organizational constraints when evaluating processes

a�Insist on modeling current processes as-is before redesigning them to get a valid baseline

a�Make a long-term commitment to process modeling and an organizational structure for IT/business dialogue

a�Start with a workshop and get the right stakeholders in a room to jump-start the discussion

a�Work top down and bottom up, simultaneously mapping out business process goals and potential service capabilities

a�Don’t be too rigid with methodology; it’s the business/IT dialogue that matters most

a�Remember that processes extend outside your organization to vendors, customers, and partners

a�Take intractable disagreements and put them in the parking lot; solve the easy problems first

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are starting with their heritage.” What enterprises should be doing, Carter argues, is looking at their processes across the board, and identifying the highest impact opportunities — such as improving customer satisfac-tion, enabling better collabora-tion, or more quickly getting new products to market. “If you try to start with ESB [enterprise ser-vice bus], we’ll push you to look at your process,” Carter says. “The process you select to start with SOA on is crucial.”

As an example of how small process shortcomings can have huge business impacts, she cites a Columbian coffee com-pany that had 17 different ways to label a single coffee bean. “Because they had different ways to qualify it around the world, they couldn’t tell if they were in or out of stock — it was there, but just designated a different way. It seemed like a simple little thing, but it was costing the company a lot of money.”

In IBM’s component business mod-eling framework, consultants typically pull together diverse business stake-holders for a rigorous, full-blown map-ping exercise. A session with a retail industry client, for example, might include representatives from IT, busi-ness administration (HR, corporate strategy, financial planning, and com-pliance), distribution and warehous-ing ( for logistics expertise), product merchandising, and marketing.

“This is all about governance,” Carter says. “At the very highest level of busi-ness, most companies are doing it as

a business transformation. You need alignment of business and IT, and a set decision-making process. And you need rules for compliance — everyone will use this particular service.”

Just don’t expect any magic formu-las that can be applied across the

board, Forrester’s Heffner says. “It’s less important to figure

out which process mod-eling method you’re

using, and more important to

ensure that you’re getting

a rich dialogue between the busi-

ness and IT,” he says. “Success now is char-

acterized by personality,” Heffner argues — the involve-

ment of self-starters who com-bine business and IT savvy, create

opportunities by making connections, build relationships around a process area, and just make things happen.

“Forget about best practices,” Heffner says. “Take bits from here and there ... just enough process modeling, just enough technology. This is not the kind of thing we’ve had in the industry long enough for it to be programmatized in a way that leads to good outcomes.”

Focus too rigidly on either pure process modeling or services archi-tecture, Heffner warns, and you could end up in a methodology boneyard. “Three years ago, somebody drew some maps, and they’re not really part of any solution delivery process [today]. At this point, you should be establishing opportunities, design-ing your business as you’re design-ing your services, understanding how your business will function in the digital world,” he says. “You don’t want to freeze either of these design

points … success is characterized by the dynamics of the process.”

Meeting in the MiddleExecution is key to a successful process/services mashup, according to analysts — from methods for resolving conflicts, to grounding your assumptions in spe-cifics, to leaving room for the business-use cases and SOA to evolve over time.

One frequent challenge that pro-cess-design teams face is getting past a small number of intractable disagree-ments, often while trying to consoli-date redundant legacy systems that enable similar processes, CSC’s Rho-dy says. “A lot of the conflicts are turf battles, people with competing agen-das,” he notes, citing billing and cus-tomer information as two frequent battlegrounds. “There may be anoth-er organization in the same company that wants to do the same thing, with their own technology.”

The answer is what Rhody calls “the parking lot”: Put the 20 percent con-flict on hold while you get agreement on the rest.

“When people see we’ve got 80 per-cent agreement and are making signif-icant progress, they now have to start to resolve things,” Rhody explains. “Getting that forward momentum gives the sponsors the collateral they need to push forward.”

Rhody also suggests making sure to ground your planning phase in reality and specifics, including a shared tax-onomy. “Most issues are about tech-nology, interoperability, and business choice,” he explains. In a recent engagement where a client was try-ing to work out the process for getting a single view of a customer’s financial holdings, for example, “it was pretty clear to everybody what the process was for querying the systems. What

“it’s an eye-opening experience when the business sees a process-centric view of their work.”

— Rohn Griggs, Wachovia

I N F OWO R L D . C O M 0 3 . 1 3 . 0 6 23

was less clear was whose definition of holdings should be used, and how do you get the consensus on that.”

Services must be grounded in the real world, Rhody adds. “If every time your process is going to do a lookup by account number, and your services don’t have an account number, they use a social security number, you’ve got to know that. Starting from the business process downward to ser-vices doesn’t work — you need to come bottom up and top down and meet in the middle.”

Lockheed Martin’s Vibbert, who developed a services-oriented mod-eling methodology for his company, includes tolerance for uncertainty as a best practice. Vibbert’s methodol-ogy centers on breaking down goals, business cases, and use cases, while simultaneously starting to define potential services, their SLAs, and a data model. The next step is defining core or common services that can be re-used across use cases.

“The tricky part is when you start defining the use cases, you can only identify x number of them,” Vib-bert notes. “But there’s always that n-plus-1 that you might not think of. The nature of an SOA is ad hoc. Someone can re-orchestrate the ser-vices in an unpredicted way and get value as well.”

Because much of the execution-related learning on business process mapping and SOA is cumulative, experts recommend a continuous commitment to careful, collaborative planning efforts. “Organizations are building this in as part of an ongoing strategy to understand their business and data architecture,” says Jan Pop-kin, chief strategist for architecture software firm Telelogic. “As projects come along, they plug into that.” i

DoD Puts SOA Into Actionwhen it comes to modeling complex business processes, the folks at the U.S. Transportation Command (U.S. Transcom) have a lot of experience. As the central defense agency responsible for worldwide air, land, and sea transportation for the U.S. armed services, U.S. Transcom has been developing internal process architec-tures for more than a decade.

That experience came in handy recently when, as part of a government-wide push toward SOA, it stepped up its efforts to develop services that can be leveraged across multiple processes, both internally and by its many military partners and commercial vendors.

“We had a jumpstart on understanding the value of doing architecture work,” says a U.S. Transcom representative who asked not to be identified. “We have a full blown architecture here — all the processes, including information exchange requirements between systems. We looked at what was being driven down from the highest levels on SOA by the DISA [Defense Information Systems Agency] and NII [Networks and Information Integration] guys — and asked how can we start to instantiate those kinds of services against our operational processes to make them more effective.”

Having spent a year evaluating actual processes, such as manifesting (for thou-sands of ships, aircraft, and railcars) or distributing ammunition, the command has now started building standardized services and transaction sets that will enable a more efficient flow of information and matériel throughout its far-flung network, according to the representative.

“We worked the business issues with the functional guys as we built the architec-ture,” the representative says. “We … essentially said to the community, We really need to understand these business processes better.” Some of the key issues involved the many relationships the command has with external agencies, such as how to manage handoffs of both information and cargo, explains Dennis Nadler, CTO of Merlin Technical Solutions, a consulting firm that supported the project.

“One of the main thrusts is around sharing of information,” Nadler says. “In the past, when people wanted to interface with US Transcom’s GTN [Global Transporta-

tion Network], they had to go through a giant develop-ment effort. Whereas now they can go to a registry and

discover the Web service, for example, that provides passenger manifests for an airplane.”

Key insights from the work done so far, accord-ing to the US Transcom representative, include the importance of doing up-front business

process mapping down to a detailed level, via the architectural workshops with subject

matter experts.“We’re one of the few government

agencies that is using this type of architecture to drive the SOA envi-ronment,” the representative adds. And as with many SOA initiatives, the ultimate payoff will be a whole new level of agility. “We need to be able to say, ‘I need to be able

to readjust the planning of a shipment; I need it to go here and not there.’” — D.M.

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