Todd Biske: Outside the Box

Full disclosure: I am attending Oracle OpenWorld courtesy of Oracle.

The speaker is Dirk Stähler from Opitz Consulting And he is talking about how to bridge the information gap using Oracle BPA Suite and an integrated model.

He started by presenting the EA, BPM, and SOA problem which includes no unified methodology, unclear semantics, and no differentiation between EA, BPM, and SOA aspects.

He presented the three domains in a Venn diagram and called out the overlap in artifacts from each, including org structure, infrastructure, business processes, IT systems, and business objects. This overlap forms the foundation for the metamodel which can be captured in Oracle’s BPA suite.

In discussing this, he presented a pyramid, where EA is at the top (providing a conceptual blueprint of the org), underneath that is business process management (as a business design tool), then comes technical business process management (for IT specifications), and finally is information technology (supporting development). SOA spans one leg of the pyramid, impacting all four layers.

In discussing the artifacts, he defined domains for process architecture, application architecture, infrastructure architecture, data architecture, organziation architecture, and service architecture. All of the artifacts can be captured in BPA suite. In aligning this to EA, BPM, and SOA, he feels that EA covers app and infrastructure architecture, BPM covers organization, process, and data, and SOA covers service and some of data.

After this, he switched to a demo of the BPA suite, showing how to navigate the metamodel, associate different diagram types with different domains, etc. As someone with no experience with BPA suite or any other EA tooling, this was a good overview of how BPA suite could be used to manage the various models associated with an EA practice. The metamodel description covered how to separate these things within BPA suite, however the talk did not get into any issues or concerns with having two or even three different audiences using one centralized tool and repository, making sure they leverage each other’s work where appropriate.

For more information, they have published a book on their methodology, however it is currently only available in german.