Moving Away From Silos

Current State

IT can no longer continue to automate in silos. Must enable and support business change and process improvement, but business people still see IT as the automation people and  don’t see the need to model their business.

The Outcome

Top management sees the need to model the enterprise in order to understand and adapt it. Integrated models provide consistent views that provide top management abstraction; door to implementation; either manual or automated processes and applications.

 

Connected Models

Current State

Models, if they exist, are independent, disconnected and oriented around the silos. Nothing looks across to other applications or across the business unit, much less the enterprise. Integration is point-to-point & based on the cheapest “easiest” route.

The Outcome

Models link up and act as reference points that can build on each other. Business can then understand what happens and what can change smoothly.

 

IT Doesn’t Work

Current State

Why doesn’t IT work as it is intended?

The Outcome

The standards evolution will enable deployment of a true “manage-by-model” environment.

 

Super Model

Current State

Currently the model driven organization doesn’t work as there is no “super-model” underpinning tooling that enables high-level business users and low-level software developers to be connected in a common life-cycle that enables them to share assets, but to do so from the perspective of their persona, e.g. functional decomp.

The Outcome

We need a supermodel that enavles UML, WSDL, BPMN, Forms, XSD, Web Services, etc. to exist in a common and connected environment. This would allow tools to focus on the particular needs of their users (rather than being a reflection of the underlying model).

 

Link to Software Generation

Current State

Currently there is no linkage between BPMN/BPDM that shares a common meta-model with the portions of the process that we want to automate (generate code).

The Outcome

A common meta-model which supports both notations BPMN and UML so that the model elements can be related and have a dynamic model rather than a transform.

 

Ease Of Use

Current State

Business users are sold on the ease of use associated with generating the model and getting it to an executable process. In reality we are not quite at the level of ease of use.

The Outcome

The glue to bring together disparate applications into the model (tool) and bring the “sold” ease of use nearer to reality.

 

Understanding The Impact of Changing An Artifact

Current State

An artifact produced by one business activity is consumed by several other activities somewhere in the organization. A change is made to that artifacts attributes—no one knows the cost of that change to the organization or what other activities it affects.

The Outcome

The artifacts change is simulated and its affect on other activities and the cost is known before the final decision is made as to whether or not to make the change.

 

Cultural/Mind-Set Change

Current State

More and more companies are recognizing the value of a model-driven organization, but are lacking the commitment, resources and understanding necessary to implement it properly. Therefore, many such initiatives are falling short or are not ever being model-driven organizational initiatives.

The Outcome

A change of culture/mind-set driven top-down driven effort to regain control over the business by achieving, in the best possible case, the “gold-standard” of a model-driven organization. This will allow it to create the appropriate business model for every stage of competition in the market place.

 

Avoiding Hard Coding

Current State

Organizations try to describe or express their operations in the form of business processes or models. However, these models are often translated into rigid implementations (hard-coded) by IT, mixing process and implementation concerns. Processes are no longer visibile or changeable to non-technical business users.

The Outcome

Model driven organizations would be able to execute different management intent by changing the appropriate process model and the model is directly executable. This is powered by the process based composite application created by assembling the SOA parts to carry out the underlying execution, which collectively accomplish the management intent.

 

Dealing With Legacy

Current State

Much legacy code, legacy processes, legacy business rules and legacy organization … all dimly understood. Changes need to be made – how?

Magic

Mining of the code, policies and people knowledge integration models that can guide the change.

 

Complete Business model

Current State

Multiple complete/incomplete  and as yet unwritten specs that provide a disjoint/fragmented view of meaning; not possible to achieve full potential for determining impact of change and ability to align business with strategic goals.

The Outcome

Full business model that includes the ability to model everything from organizational structure, resources, processes, business rules and higher level constructs that support full change history and integrity between all components, such that you can predict and then measure the impact of changes, etc.

 

Models Lead To Understanding

Current State

Few models, lack of transparency into what and how things are happening in parts of the business. Thus, it is difficult to understand the implications of certain changes. Leads to lack of agility as people are unable to make changes for fear of breaking something

The Outcome

With models, much better understanding of the scope of changes. Users can be much more confident that a possible change wont break things elsewhere. Ability to replace a component because it is known what it does. Better communication—models provide terminology so people have some understanding of the discussed concepts.