IBM just published the draft of a RedBook titled "Business Process Management enabled by SOA". The RedBook provides a general methodology which aims at aligning Process, IT and SOA governance to support BPM initiatives.
The methodology provides a set of phases, each consisting of activities and deliverables that provide the foundation for the BPM solution development and management. A common set of workstreams is executed across the phases.
The RedBook is structured along the phases of a project (Envision, Assess, Define, Execute, and Optimize) and several work streams:
- Business Strategy Alignment
- Process Governance
- Business Process
- SOA and IT Technology
- SOA and IT Governance
The authors define Process Governance as:
Process governance is applied within the framework of corporate governance. [...] The purpose of process governance is to ensure that the enterprise's operational and support processes:
- Implement the enterprise's business strategy
- Incorporate the constraints defined by governance decisions made by the enterprise
- Have the right organization, with the right knowledge, and using the right technology to achieve the desired value realization
- Have the right system of performance measurements to monitor organizational performance, process vitality, strategic alignment, and value realization
- Contain the processes needed to sense and respond to organizational and process performance issues
- Contain the processes needed to provide insight and oversight of enterprise operations in order to certify compliance of external mandates and internal decisions
They also comment on the importance of SOA Governance:
In SOA, service consumers and service providers run in different processes, are developed and managed by different departments, and require a lot of coordination to work together successfully. For SOA to succeed, multiple applications need to share common services, which means they need to coordinate on making those services common and reusable. These are governance issues, and they're much more complex than in the days of monolithic applications or even in the days of reusable code and components.
They see SOA Governance addressing:
- Service definition
- Service migration
- Service message model
- Service ownership
- Service testing
- Service registration
- Service versioning
- Service ownership
- Service funding
- Service monitoring
- Service auditing
- Service diagnostics
- Service identification
- Service modeling
- Service publishing
- Service discovery
- Service development
- Service consumption
- Service provisioning
- Access to services
- Deployment of services and composite applications
- Security for services
The RedBook then addresses organizational aspects of Process, IT and SOA governance. In particular they define the BPM Center of Excellence RACI chart.
At this point the authors are seeking feedback to complete their work. Did you successfully deploy a SOA Governance organization? How about a Process Governance organization? How do you see the alignment between Process, IT and SOA Governance?
