The South East Asia SOA Weblog

With organisations like the IASA (International Association of Software Architects) growing momentum in South East Asia, it is now very clear that the community of architects is set to strengthen. In the near term however, strong leadership is needed in order to guide the community down the path to productivity.

Historically in Asia we have experienced a very hands on approach in the IT industry and organizations have typically focused on delivery of basic features and functions with less emphasis on the finer points of architecture and design. This approach is a double edged sword as it not only cheapens the industry as a whole but it also lowers the value that IT brings to business.

The era of SOA is to an extent set to change this continuum but the transition will take time as the level of thinking required to design a solution from which the business can truly benefit needs top be raised. Executing on enterprise architecture at this level takes actual experience and that just cannot be taught in universities.

For businesses, the stakes are already getting higher with deregulation and experienced foreign competitors hitting the local markets in all industries. Regulatory controls can only protect markets for so long as the pressure of globalization and trade agreements tears down the borders and exposes traditional markets to foreign competition. I am not yet convinced that many South East Asian businesses truly recognize this. The days of procrastination and cheap noddy solutions are over.

It is high time for South East Asia to adopt more mature processes for evolving enterprise architectures and grow the talent pool. The cost of IT is a very small line item in the context of what it can deliver to a business… just think of the 1,2,3 and 5% improvements that can be delivered to a $2B business and run that through your ROI calculator.

I just came back from BEA Welcome Event in Dharmawangsa Hotel, Jakarta last week (August 14, 2008). The event talks about the new product road map for Oracle middleware after the acquisition of BEA Systems.

Actually the road map has been made official since July 1st, 2008, complete webcast and presentation of the entire roadmap can be found in Oracle website here.

In the BPM area, as Bruce Silver predicted before in his observation, Oracle is trying to combine Oracle BPEL Process Manager and BEA Aqua Logic BPM into one integrated BPM solution. Oracle BPEL Process Manager is targeting the enterprise integration perspective with its support towards Web Service standard and BEA ALBPM is targeted towards workflow and business process optimization perspective.

At this moment, the two solutions still feel as separate solutions, with each of them has its own IDE and running environment, maybe Oracle will try to combine them in the future into one integrated framework for BPM. We’ll see how it develops.

I will be running the Business Process Management Workshops in Jakarta and Kuala Lumpur by the end of this month.

This 2-days workshop is titled “Implementing Continuous Improvement in Your Organization”. It is organized by JCCreative and supported by PWS Consulting and IASA. We will be discussing about the BPM Implementation Framework in details and how to embed BPM within the organization and aligning it with other technology initiatives like SOA, ECM and Web 2.0

The BPM Implementation Framework itself is a 10-phase implementation framework which covers the following:

• Organization Foundation
• Process Foundation
• Technology Foundation
• Elaboration
• Improvement
• People and Technology Development
• Deployment
• Monitor and Benefit Realization
• Continuous Improvement

The framework will guide the organization by providing a solid reference in implementing BPM. It will touch essential elements, like:

• Aligning the BPM initiative with the organization strategy
• Setting up rules and guidelines for the process models
• Taking a look at the IT infrastructures that support the BPM initiative
• Setting up the project goals, business case and project teams for the execution of the projects
• Understanding, modeling and baselining based on the current processes
• Improving and prioritizing the improvements
• People development, people change management and integrating supporting IT infrastructure to develop an automated BPM solution
• Deployment, training of staffs
• Monitoring and realizing the BPM benefits in each phase of the framework
• Last, but not least, embedding and converting the results of the project into the business-as-usual daily activities

The workshop targets a broad range of audience from business process consultants, architects, IT consultants to C-level executives. For further information about the workshop and registration details, please visit http://jccreativemax.com/bpm-home1.htm

I am really looking forward for the workshops.