Microsoft Motion
I was at the Gartner ADIWS summit in Sydney earlier this week, and while on the MS booth fielded several questions about Motion.
In case you haven't heard of it, Motion is an approach to building a business IT architecture that focuses on identifying business capabilities (i.e. bill customer), and then describing these capabilities in terms of their attributes (owner, contracts, cost, metrics, governance, sla's etc.). Note that this is a business-oriented discusion. For example, when we discuss 'contracts' at this level, we are not talking about technology - we are talking about a contract that the business might have with customers that guides billing behaviour.
A fundamental premise of Motion is that these capabilities - the 'what' - of the organisation are largely invariant. Regardless of the how you do it, you are always going to want to have some way of communicating to the customer they owe you money. Once you understand this capability from the perspective of the business, you can then start to look at the volitile mechanisms - the people, processes and technology that at a particular point in time deliver this capability to the organisation.
For instance, your billing system may include Fred (people) in accounts hand-writing an invoice for a customer (process), sticking this into an envelope and recording the fact that the customer has been billed in a ledger (technology). Or it may include an automated ERP system (technology) that emails an invoice to a customer (process).
It helps to be able to factor out these volitile dimensions, because (a) at some stage you might decide that the billing capability is best served by a third-party and because (b) you can start to identify areas of re-use of both invariant capability as well as processes and technology that are common across capabilities.
In some cases, this leads naturally onto a SOA discussion: given that we have a more complete understanding of the business capability and it's attributes, how can we most effectively map this onto people, process and technology? What SOA service candidates do we have in our organisation, and how can we architect these for reuse across the organisation? Are there capabilities that are non-core that we can outsource to third parties via services?
So, Motion provides a methodology and process for having structured conversations with the business to tease capability factors out, and for then prioritising and selecting projects that align with business objectives and people process and technology.
At this stage, Motion is still in incubation - there's actually very little that's been written in the public domain about it, although it is offered as an MCS engagement here and elsewhere around the world. Having said that, there are some resources that you might find useful to assist your understanding of what Motion is and how it works:
A Contextual article in MS Journal 7 on Modelling for connected systems, which describes how Motion can be used to identify business capabilities that are then mapped to services http://www.architecturejournal.net/2006/issue7/F7_Modeling1/default_pf.aspx (part one of a two part series, next part to be published in Journal 8 later this year).
A great ARCcast podcast Series on Motion http://channel9.msdn.com/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=164859 (2 part series - also includes video version with slides).
Channel 9 video with Ric Merrifield, Motion Strategy Directory discussing the approach http://channel9.msdn.com/Showpost.aspx?postid=179071.
Motion Lite on MSDN: A two-day effort focussed on explaining the business architecture approach, and using ideas and templates from Motion to help prioritise and select projects (http://msdn.microsoft.com/architecture/default.aspx?pull=/library/en-us/dnbda/html/motionlite.asp).
