Making BPM Sound Cool Again
Sunday, May 14th 2006 | Ismael Ghalimi
To the trained eye, Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) looks awfully similar to the Common Object Request Architecture (CORBA) of the 90’s. Difference is, SOA deals with Web Services while CORBA dealt with stubs and skeletons. Web Services sound cool. Stubs and skeletons don’t. SOA will succeed where CORBA failed, and timing is not the only reason for it. Words are potent. The same is true for BPM, and the recent efforts by Dion Hinchcliffe or Sandy Kemsley to make it sound cool again should be praised.
Both Dion and Sandy advocate in their articles (Dion’s, Sandy’s) what are referred to as enterprise mashups. To the IT expert, these might not look much different from plain-vanilla Enterprise Application Integration (EAI), but customers will like the former much more than they liked the later. Mashup sounds quick, and easy, and fun. Integration sounds expensive, and difficult, and plainful. Words matter.
Quite frankly, I do not know what BPM should be called to regain it’s appeal. When I wrote the first white paper on BPMS in the Spring of 2000, my coach at the time (Marylene Delbourg-Delphis) advised me that the word process had some bad connotation, inherited mainly from the Business Process Reengineering legacy. I was young(er) and foolish(er) at the time, so I did not pay much attention to it. I should have had, but there is no time for regrets now, so we’ll have to stick to the word ‘process’ I guess. But the word ‘mashup’ sure sounds cool, so I might start writing about process mashups more and more. We’ll see if that one sticks…
UPDATE 6/21/2006: Joe McKendrick wrote a good article on Mashup vs. SOA.
Entry filed under: BPM 2.0, SOA
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“Hey, that Salieri guy’s Google numbers are way up! Mozart must suck.”…
What it must have been like when instant gratification wasn’t so instant… I have been trying to find the exact quote that’s attributed to Bill Gates about how technology always takes longer to catch on than you first expect, …
It’s more than just words: although mashups and EAI are both in the integration space, they’re at the opposite ends of the spectrum. Mashups are purely web-based, and often pay little or no heed to standards, although many are starting to use microformats within HTML pages to aid in parsing the data. All of the mashups that I’ve seen combined data from multiple third-party sources and present it to a user for interaction. EAI, on the other hand (or SOA or web services or whatever else that you want to put at that end of the spectrum) is much more likely to be standards-based as we move towards SOAP and other web services standards for interfacing applications (including wrapping legacy applications) within an enterprise, and often is a pure system-to-system exchange of data.
Yes, they’re both integration, but you can’t just glibly replace the word “EAI” with “mashup” and expect to be taken seriously.
Sandy,
I agree with you, EAI and enterprise mashups are not the same and represent both ends of a wide spectrum today. Nevertheless, I tend to believe that technologies supporting enterprise mashups will slowly but surely evolve toward a solid Service Oriented Architecture, and I expect both to be indistinguishable down the road. How long it will take is just a matter of personal faith.
Much the same happened for SOA by the way: the first version of XML-RPC was a joke compared to IIOP five or six years ago. Then came SOAP and WSDL, soon followed by a host of Web Services specifications that together provide a much more solid foundation than CORBA ever managed to offer.
Simplicity early on in the adoption process is what makes it work in the end.
BPM is a business discipline. It does not have to be cool, even if it can be supported by a BPMS toolset. SOA is just CORBA reborn, which might be cool to the tech industry. It is not cool to business people, just confusing. When will the tech industry learn this lesson? As for “mash-ups”, that just a name for a PROCESS, which a BPMS can do very well. Does that make a BPMS cool again? No. Only things with sexy names like mash-ups can be cool, especially if they are vaguely defined. Give up on the idea that BPM must be cool again.
Howard,
I won’t give up, I’m a believer. Sorry…
[…] One of the trends I detected at the Brainstorm BPM Conference in San Francisco this week is an effort to make BPM more engaging to users via Web 2.0 and Ajax. This dovetails with Ismael’s suggestions about how to make BPM cool again. […]
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