Plan for Today's Class

• What is a pattern?

• Why businesses follow patterns

• Integrating America / Why Care About Processes? / What's in a Name?

• The Model Matrix

• Federal Enterprise Architecture

• Business Model Patterns

Patterns

• A Pattern is a model that is sufficiently general, adaptable, and worthy of imitation that it can be reused

• It must be general so that...

• It must be adaptable because ...

• It must be worthy because ...

Why Businesses Follow Patterns

• At the most abstract level all businesses (or "enterprises," so that we can include governmental, educational, military, and non-profit "businesses") follow the same pattern

• Businesses share common external influences, especially those in the same industry

• They also share common internal influences and goals

• Some resistance to using patterns arises from the need for a business to differentiate itself from competitors, but few companies have the market dominance or true innovations to divert from patterns in significant ways

Modeling to Identify Patterns

• Models are also valuable design tools for identifying recurring patterns in both structures and processes

• Often these patterns are visible in the model but invisible in the concrete, real-world objects and functions that the model describes

• Once patterns are identified they assist in analysis by simplifying structures and processes as they replace low-level specific descriptions with more abstract ones

Patterns and Reuse

• In addition to improving designs (by replacing an ad hoc approach with a successful one) - patterns promote reuse

• Reuse has the immediate benefit of reduced implementation and maintenance costs

• Reuse has the longer term benefit of encouraging and reinforcing consistency and standardization

• Reuse at more abstract levels enables interoperability between systems that follow patterns that differ at more concrete levels

Integrating America

• A CIO's perspective on document engineering in the new Homeland Security Department.

• What are the four technical and organizational challenges in combining 22 agencies, hundreds of systems, and 170,000 employees?

• How is this integration effort going?

What is Business Process Design and Why Should I Care?

• A process is an goal-oriented activity that takes specified inputs and adds value to the inputs

Process Inputs and Outputs [1]

• The goals, inputs, and added value can be just about anything

Process Inputs and Outputs [2]

• The output of one process can be the input to another

• But only if ...

What is a Business Process Model?

• The set of processes and activities arranged in a hierarchy of detail

• A text description of each process or activity that conforms to a template so that the information is presented consistently and completely

• Drawings that illustrate the relationships between activities

  • An example from a domain you'll recognize

• Inputs and outputs for each activity, including the source or destination of each information flow and the characteristics of the data itself

• Key performance indicators

Why We Create Business Process Models (Generic)

• To ensure that all participants, stakeholders, software providers, standards developers, etc. have a common understanding of the enterprise and business domain

• To understand the enterprise independent of its current or future technology

• To identify and understand gaps, inefficiencies, overlaps, and opportunities

Why We Create Business Process Models (Specific)

• Need for greater business speed and efficiency

• Need to evaluate potential new business partners; when two enterprises seek to "do business" with each other, they need to make their business processes compatible

• Need to capture "know how" for operations and training

• Other reasons? ...

What's in a Name?

• "The expense of resolving ambiguous business terms over and over on a daily basis pales in comparison with the expense of NOT realizing that there is an ambiguity in the term"

Three Kinds of Names

• Farish recommends three "levels" of models (or names) that line up nicely with our three stages of analysis, design, and encoding

• Business names – a format that lets the requirement or semantics be easily readable and verifiable by a business person (not a modeling or XML expert)

• Logical names – a format optimized for the expression of the design or model; essential that they are expressive enough to reflect the relationships between model components

• Physical names – the format required by the implementation technology for the model; there may be length or character set constraints, sorting considerations, naming rules like the use of CamelCase for elements and lowerCamelCase for attributes

Model and Pattern Granularity

• Business model or organizational patterns: marketplace, auction, supply chain, build to order, drop shipment, vendor managed inventory, etc.

• Business process patterns: procurement, payment, shipment, reconciliation, etc.

• Business information patterns: catalog, purchase order, invoice, etc. and the components they contain for party, time, location, measurement, etc.

The Model Matrix

The Model Matrix: Examples

The Model Matrix: Navigation

The Model Matrix: 4 Modeling Approaches

Meeting in the Middle

• We need to achieve both business and technical interoperability – the former is necessary but insufficient for the latter

• We need models of the desired business processes and the documents that they will produce and consume at the same level of detail and implementability

• This is represented in the Model Matrix as "meeting in the middle"

Getting to the Middle

Yin and Yang: Modeling Documents {and,vs,or} Modeling Processes

• A document exchange consists of both the documents and the processes that produce and consume them

• By understanding the information in the documents, we learn what kinds of processes are possible

• By understanding the processes, we learn what kinds of information are needed

Equal Billing for Documents and Processes

• In the "generic application" information flows through a set of business processes and their associated document types

A Document-Centric Depiction

• A document-centric depiction focuses on the documents and de-emphasizes the processes as the transitions between document types

A Process-Centric Depiction

• A process-centric depiction de-emphasizes the documents and treats them as process inputs and outputs

The Federal Enterprise Architecture -- Motivation

The Federal Enterprise Architecture -- Goals

FEA Reference Models

FEA BRM "Architecture"

"Disaster Management" LOB

• Disaster Monitoring and Prediction

• Disaster Preparedness/Planning

• Disaster Repair and Restore

• Emergency Response

FEA Example

BRM Fragment in Education

• From http://www.proformacorp.com/Products/education.asp

Business Model Patterns

• This is interactive at http://process.mit.edu/Info/eModels.asp

Readings for 6 February

• Chapter 4 of Document Engineering [Textbook, 102-118]

• "Principles of E-Government Architecture" Sean McGrath and Fergal Murray

• "It All Began With Drayer" Christopher Koch CIO (August 2002)

• Supply-Chain Operations Reference Model, Supply-Chain Council