Business Process Experience And a Mission for SOA Satish R. Thatte Software Architect Microsoft

Perfume for the King

Beer for the Masses Business processes and systems of record for business transactions are not a new phenomenon! The silver bullets of process models solve 10% of the problem if that (remember the parable of the man under the lamp-post)

What is a Business Process? A business process is what business applications for ERP, CRM, PLM, SCM,.. provide when customized to fit my business practices A business process is what those expensive armies of consultants “re-engineer and implement” blowing my budget without improving my ROI and results ERP etc solve 30% of the problem – much better than 10% but it still leaves a lot of frustrated customers questioning the value of their investment A business process is the orchestration of services A business process is a model for handling business events A business process is a human-centric workflow Technology Common Packaging with Data ManagementAll Too Frequent Business Reality

The Core Problem of Business Process Support Systems Help the 3D world of real business process deal with the 2D world of LOB Apps 90% of Business Process Cannot and Will Not be Modeled , IM, Voice Collaboration, Sharing Data Access & Transactions B2B Automated Business Protocols Data Access & Transactions Data In Flight Landed Data

Business Process Applications The Integrating Principle is A Common User Experience Model not a Common Data Model

Business Process Applications A Revolution in the Making!

Deal with the Unsolved Problem of Business Process Experience , IM, Voice Collaboration, Sharing Tasks, Alerts Data Access & Transactions Tasks, Alerts B2B Automated Business Protocols Focus of Traditional Process Automation Models (e.g., BPEL) Focus of Business Process Experience Models (e.g., LOBi) Data Access & Transactions

Demo LOB Systems should be like the perfect butler

Office Business Platform and LOBi Microsoft announced the Office Business Platform (OBP) at TechEd 2006 in June – OBP is a comprehensive business process platform built around SharePoint Server – Line of Business interoperability (LOBi) services for SharePoint were also announced at TechEd 2006 LOBi is the subject of this presentation LOBi will provide capabilities focused on rich clients More information at: OBAPR.mspx

The Semantic Web of Business Entities Business Entities Reflect Integrated Ontology of Business Data and Functions Customer Order Issue Product Supplier

Constructing the Business Entity Web Beyond Portals The world-wide web works because it is based on stereotyped models for naming and linking, access and content – HTTP verbs for resource access – HTML/MIME for resource content – URIs for resource naming and linking The business application layer in an enterprise is very different – The information is often locked up in fragmented applications – Every application has its own specialized user experience – If there are programmable access points for business content they are structured as idiosyncratic APIs often using proprietary access protocols An essential step in constructing a business entity web is to construct and apply standardized REST-like models to business application content and APIs – SOA and service composition models play a key role in the mapping layer – Content is XML but reusable UI models are challenging (rich, thin & mobile)

SOA meets the Semantic Web Entity Web Services are the Business Ontology Layer Please Put the A Back in SOA Adapters LOB Systems Entity Web Services Service Agent Service Agent Cache Document/PIM Collaboration Content Context-Specific Business Data User

LOBi CRT config Svc Agent User LOBi Solution LOBi Development Architecture Model Type Library (Entity Proxies) EWS Interfaces Deployment Package Adapters LOB Systems EWS Model OB Parts Layouts Contexts Rules Bindings Data Sources Services Model Designer Application Designer EWS Designer Cache

How Can the Academic Community Help Solve BP Problems? Ontology mapping at Many Levels – Obvious: Constructing the EWS Layer – Less Obvious: Solve the tension between the requirements of an enterprise ontology of business entities and the workability of an ISV ecosystem – Related to Mathias Weske’s ontology reasoning?? The marriage of CEP, EDA and BRE looks far more interesting to me as a “process modeling” methodology than Petri nets, Pi, BPEL etc. – It is far more flexible, easy to change etc Few or none of the problems that Peter solves – But it does have a problem of predictability