Why do we need another business modelling tool?

ArchitectInsight — Mon, 26 Feb 2007 23:38:00 GMT

Why do we need another business modelling tool?

5^th March 17:25 – 18:40

Capability Mapping - A Foundation for Service Orientated Architecture

Last year’s Insight Conference was set buzzing by what was then codenamed Motion but which now is called Microsoft Service Business Architecture, or MSBA. All the capability mapping that excited last year’s delegates remains in place, but MSBA’s supporting tools have matured and it is performing a very important role for SOA practitioners.

The noisy (and I think entirely spurious) calls for “SOA 2.0” should be seen as a reminder that SOA doesn’t come with any guarantee of success. For example, check out Cape Clear’s Top 10 SOA Worst Practices webinar at http://tinyurl.com/3an9sv and register at http://www.mwdadvisors.com to read how to avoid SOA failures from influential industry analysts Macehiter Ward-Dutton.

The message from these and other sources is clear: SOA only makes sense as a business-driven strategy. But business executives are not easily persuaded that SOA means anything of value to them, so they will not sponsor an SOA initiative for themselves and would be unlikely to fund an IT-led one.

CIOs and CTOs do have a way forward, though, because if they can’t have a business-led SOA strategy they can certainly have one that is business-driven, which is where MSBA comes in. Let’s be honest here and acknowledge that business people are pretty poor at analysing what they do in a way that technologists can make much use of. The conventional models of a business are organisation charts and process models, both of which frequently change, are usually superficial and are often metric-free. MSBA focuses single-mindedly on what businesses do rather than how they happen to do it or how they are organised to do it. Separating the what from the how creates a surprisingly durable view of the business. For instance the “raise invoice” capability is hundreds of years old despite immense technological and regulational changes, although any particular “raise invoice” workflow would be lucky to last more than a year.

What has changed since 2006 is that MSBA now focuses as much on the connectors between capabilities as on the capabilities themselves. Connectors are implemented by services, which is where SOA practitioners start to take notice. An MSBA-based web service has a clear business owner, role and quality of service expectations defined by the business capability it belongs to and the business capabilities which it serves. Those capabilities might be reorganised, outsourced or automated but they, and the connections between them, will remain relatively stable and long-lived. Understand them and you can create an SOA strategy that will survive countless reorganisations, outsourcing initiatives and business process re-engineering exercises.

Mike Lloyd

Managing Director, Carbonflame.

Microsoft Architect Insight Conference : MSBA

Why do we need another business modelling tool?