The promises of Service Oriented Enterprise Architecture include greater business agility, improved application integration at reduced cost, and the holy grail of aligning IT initiatives with business objectives. Achieving these goals requires organizations to approach SOA from an Enterprise Architecture perspective.
Although existing EA processes and tools can be adapted to facilitate SOA, a new approach is gaining wider acceptance as being especially suited to this task.
Capability Modeling focuses on the things that business units can do instead of how they do them. There is a direct corollary to the best practices of service design, where the focus of analysis is on what a service does instead of how it is implemented. Business Capabilities can be described in terms that the business is familiar with, and then mapped directly to services implemented by systems supported by the IT organization.
This presentation covers the basics of Capability Modeling and how this important technique can be used by Enterprise Architects to facilitate an SOA adoption program.
Using Capability Modeling to Facilitate SOA Adoption
1. Welcome
to Transformation and Innovation 2007
The Business Transformation Conference
Chip Wilson
Chief Technology Officer
Geniant
Using Capability Modeling to Facilitate
SOA Adoption
May 22-24, 2007 1
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2. Four Domains of
Enterprise Architecture
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3. Why Business Architecture
The forgotten stepchild of
•
Enterprise Architecture
• The least integrated of the four
• The four domains are interdependent
• None should be defined in isolation
• Necessitates a consistent approach to defining Enterprise
Architecture
• Need for alignment between business and IT is merely an
alternative way of expressing this
Too little effort has been put into creating a common
•
model that encompasses all aspects of Enterprise
Architecture
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4. What’s Wrong with
Business Process Modeling
• Represents how the business operates
at a given time
Documents and communicates how
•
rather than what
Processes change frequently
•
Optimizing for agility implies a desire to
•
facilitate change
Aligning IT with a business architecture
•
that changes frequently sets a company
up for frequent changes in the IT
architecture
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5. What Should We Model Instead?
• Focus on what is accomplished
• Business functions tend to remain
stable; underlying processes may
change radically and frequently
• Outcomes of processes typically do not
fluctuate at all
• The level of abstraction where processes
are defined by the purpose they serve
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6. What Is This Approach Based On?
• A basis can be found in business literature
addressing core competencies
• The competencies of the business are the what,
regardless of how they are accomplished
• “Capability Modeling” is an
emerging technique for
analyzing a business or industry
and modeling it in terms of
these competencies
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7. Capabilities are the
Building Blocks of Business
• Basic outcomes of Capability
business processes
• Encapsulate resources People
• People
Technology Procedures
• Technology
• Procedures Other Resources
• Other resources
• Joined together in networks to create higher
level business processes
• Composed of processes built on lower level
capabilities
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8. Business Unit Capabilities
• Defines a business unit’s purpose
• Provides a black box view SOA
• Hides internal implementation
• A direct input to service design
• Parallel black box approach
encapsulates a service’s
implementation behind its interface
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9. Capability Model Attributes
• Capabilities
• Purpose
• Service level expectation
• Customers
• Level of granularity
• Relationships
• Boundaries
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10. Levels of Granularity
• Multiple levels model the business in
successively finer levels of detail
• Capability Rule of Thumb:
• Coarse-grained enough that it remains
constant over time
• Fine-grained enough that all
stakeholders understand it
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11. Networks of Capabilities
• Relationships are as important to the Capability
Model as the capabilities themselves
Dependencies between capabilities and the
•
information that passes between them
• Indirect relationship via a higher level business process
• Capabilities can serve in an oversight capacity,
governing execution of other capabilities
• Capabilities can gather metrics on other capabilities or
in some way optimize their execution
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12. The Business Boundary
Defines The Value Chain
Company
Outsourced
functions
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13. The Physical Boundary
Defines the Corporate Entity
Environmental Outsourced value
XYZ, Inc.
chain functions
Capabilities
Operational
Capabilities
Everything outside the business boundary
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14. Core Competencies
Define Strategic Capabilities
• Delineate core competencies
(capabilities) from non-strategic
capabilities
• Core competencies converge with
physical boundary in an ideal business
architecture
• Retain core competencies within the
corporate entity
• Outsource non-strategic capabilities
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15. Capability Boundary
Defines the Interface
Outside the capability
- Black box view of the capability
- What it does rather than how it does it
Inside the capability
- Implementation of the capability
- Irrelevant to the capability model
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16. Business Context Diagram
Bu
sin
es
s
Bo
un
da
ry
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17. Enabling Agile
Business Architecture
Decouple business processes from IT systems
• Allow each to change independently from the other
• Reconfigure rapidly to respond to a changing competitive
landscape
• Evolve systems on their own lifecycle, without affecting
business processes
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18. Enabling Agile
Application Architecture
• IT systems must be decoupled from each other
Allow each system to
•
evolve independently of
others
• Swap out entire
systems without
impacting dependent
systems
• System interfaces must be decoupled from their
implementation
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19. Benefits of Decoupling
• Flexibility
• Reduced IT development costs
• Facilitates outsourcing non-core
competencies
• Orchestrating services from multiple
systems enables business process
automation
• Business analysts can implement new
business processes and automate
existing processes
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20. Benefits of a
Single Point of Contact
• Consistent self-service experience for all
• Keep systems and processes that provide
competitive advantage
• External users receive self-service
environment designed specifically for
their needs
• Improves employee visibility into
company operation
• Facilitates collaboration between remote
teams
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21. Requirements for Success
Executive Sponsorship
Communication between Business and IT
Business Focused IT
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22. Executive Sponsorship
• An SOA adoption program needs
appropriate sponsorship
Requires a strong vision grounded in
•
SOA best practices
SOA
Must be led from the top down
•
Create a common vocabulary between
•
business and IT
Capability Modeling creates
•
tremendous synergies – aligns the
entire Enterprise Architecture stack
from top to bottom
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23. Communication Between
Business and IT
IT must understand the strategic business direction
•
• An ongoing dialogue on business process will:
• Provide a business context for Enterprise Architecture
• Give the business community a suite of tools to automate,
improve, or even redesign business processes
Business processes:
•
• Are an important part of the alignment of IT and business
• Should not be the basis for a common understanding
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24. Ensuring IT is Business Focused
• The technical organization needs to:
• Have a solid grounding in the company’s
history
• Understand why the business operates
the way it does
• Identify opportunities for greater efficiency
• Technical community must be willing and able
to keep communication channels open to:
Keep abreast of the competitive landscape and
•
the operation of the business
• Identify opportunities to leverage technology to
further business strategy
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25. Adoption Process
• Enterprise Assessment
• Current State – Identify
systems, processes and capabilities
• Future State – Envision ideal
systems and capabilities
• Gap Analysis – Develop a roadmap for
aligning the IT environment with the
business objectives
• Implement the roadmap
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26. Enterprise Application Map
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27. Read More
• Align Journal
• Jan/Feb 2007 issue
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28. Thank You
Chip Wilson
Chief Technology Officer
Geniant
cwilson@geniant.com
www.geniant.com
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