Hello,
I have a question regarding process analysis and the influence by SOA and/or BPM (Business Process Management):
I would like to know what (extra) activities in the process analysis/(re)design phase should be made because of SOA /BPM, in comparison with a general process analysis approach. Or which activities are infuenced because of SOA/BPM and how.
By this i mean, how the work of the business process analyst changes (the process of the process analysis), and not the work around it (like the development of the enterprise architecture).
If someone has suggestions or ideas, i would really like to know. Standard activities in the process analysis are also welcome.
Thanks!
My view is that no new steps should be needed as the existing analysis > desigtn > implement process you use should include an environmental analysis that identifies opportunities and constraints. The SOA landscape is part of the environment, just like legal and regulatory constraints, and marketing opportunities.
Does anyone want to put up a process improvement model to apply to this problem?
As far as SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) goes, it should not impact your business analysis (the implementation agnostic part of your work). When you get into systems analysis and are designing the solution, working in an SOA environment would mean that you would have to consider the impact of SOA: does your company already have a platform for hosting services, do all the needed services already exist or need to be built or will be using services from 3rd party vendor, etc. Special consideration should be given to performance, availability, and scalability requirements since not all services may support the same type of loads and maybe be hosted in different environments.
Let's go back to BPM... Here it depends what you mean by BPM. If the business processes are managed "manually" using just a graphical tool then all the normal/traditional steps of business analysis are the same. However, if your goal is to use one of the new generation business process management systems (BPMS) and create libraries of business processes integrated into your existing applications and have the ability to perform simulation and detailed cost analysis then things change a bit. Besides learning a new tool and using a more exact modeling notation (such as BPMN) you will probably want to gather additional information about each step in the business process such as: how long does a task take (median vs. upper bound vs. lower bound), how much does the task cost, etc.
Is this what you were looking for?
- Adrian
Thank you for the reactions.
I think my question depends on what the general approach of business analysis is. For example: In our approach is was not usual to extract the business functions of the process (the WHAT). In a SOA environment this is important, because the business functions are candidate services. Another thing where the business rules, we didn't know them, and didn't search for it. The same goes for PPI/KPI's etc. For us this means extra activities/tasks should be taken, but for others these are probably obvious activities. Our analysis approach is immature, we do model processes but hardly for our own interest.
So maybe the question is not right, and i should ask for the normal/traditional steps of business analysis that are somehow related with SOA/BPM.
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