Agile IT Architecture

In the last few weeks, I have to work for developing more content of the process track of ISIS and ABRD. I have to study and develop artifacts for business modeling activities using IBM BlueWorks . BlueWorks is a hosted set of applications used by business analysts to discover and model business-relevant content used in a BPM deployment. A user can create elements like Strategy map, Organization Map, and BPM model in BPMN. The tools are simple to use, and give good starting point for business process implementation. Those tools are in the palette of good tools for a process analyst. BlueWorks is more than just a group of tools. It is also a knowledge sharing platform, where users can learn about BPM products and best practices and they can get presentation of successful deployments. It is a very nice environment to learn but also to collaborate. In term of useful tools a user can go to the Business Leaders environment to create the following artifacts: Strategy Map: defining, planning,

Just to update I'm still working on the future book about Agile Business Rule Development and JRules. It takes sometime taking into account the hard work we have to do with our current integration of ILOG within IBM. This blog is not dead. And I should be able to spend more time on it in the future weeks.

Discussing about agile IT architecture on this blog without going to SCA will be a major error. I'm playing with SCA since last September, and I love it. Service Component Architecture is defined as the implementation of the SOA architecture. You can read an excellent paper from David Chappell on this subject . SCA separates application business logic and the implementation details. It provides a model that defines interfaces, implementations, and references in a technology neutral way, letting us to bind these elements to any technology specific implementation. For the business case and business user point of views the value propositions are around: - Save time and money - A simpler API, Efficient GUI tools to assemble components to build new application - Enable and encourage reuse - Developers can create composites that perform useful functions. SCA makes it easy to use and reuse business logic. - Bring agility to interchange business logic - Bring visibility on how the

I have to build a demo and a presentation (co -presented) for IBM WebSphere Impact 09 on how business rules and business event work together in the context of Anti Money Laundering. James Taylor did a good summary on his blog. I promised some time ago on this blog to go through a complete example of executing ABRD on a project. So lets take this demo as a main example. Lets start with this first blog on a short description of AML and its high level process. AML business context : Money Laundering is the act of hiding illegally earned money from police and tax authority by making illicit funds appear as initiated from legal business. The Money laundering is a three step process. The first step, called ‘placement’, is done by depositing illicit funds in a business bank account. If one makes a cash deposit above 10000$ the bank is required to report the transaction to the government. The next step is called ‘layering’, wherein funds are moved from bank to bank and consolidated. The last

I presented sometime ago an architecture overview and use case for deploying a Rule Engine inside an Event Driven Architecture. There are papers from analysts and other bloggers on that subject which are predicting that EDA is becoming a hot subject in the next few months. I want to share what I found interesting. Event Driven Architecture is an asynchronous publish-and-subscribe communication pattern: Publisher applications send events to a mediation layer which is notifying the subscribers interested by the events. The publisher is completely unaware of the subscriber. Components are loosely coupled in the sense that they only share the semantic of the message. The simplest Java implementation is based on using JMS Topics as it is a natural API for pub-subscribe messaging. The data carried on the message payload are events with business means. The goal to embrace EDA is to deliver real-time access to business data. This is not really an extension of SOA but a complement of it as publ

In current difficult economic period where companies are merging, need to comply to new regulations, reduce cost, and be able to react more quickly to economic changes, building Agile and sustainable IT architecture is a must. So the book "Sustainable IT architecture" examines the use of Service Oriented Architectures (SOA) from the perspective of its contribution to the development of sustainable and agile IT systems that are able to adapt to new technology developments and to manage business processes. The book is the translation and adaptation of a first french book which has a huge success in the IT community in France, and other countries using french language. I contributed for one chapter of the book around BRMS and how this component is a major piece of the Agility Chain Management System. This book also arrived on a good timing, where some architects and journalists are questioning SOA, or claiming SOA is dying. There is no doubt about SOA, its values, and approch.

Hi To share with you the ABRD v1.2 is available for download as part of the EPF practices library, instead of dowloading it from CVS http://www.eclipse.org/epf/downloads/praclib/praclib_downloads.php Please continue to contribute and help on its enhancement. I thanks all the persons who gave me good feedback and propose changes that I did incorporate in current release or will do in the future release. ABRD is becoming more and more adopted and used, it is a simple set of practices to develop business application using rule engine technology and so very relevant when we want to use BRMS platform. I'm quite busy since these last months between the acquisition of ILOG and the book I'm writing on JRules and ABRD. I could not blog as I will expect. But stay tuned, there are a lot to come in close months around BRMS ...

As Derek Miers commented on one of my old blog, some of my BPM maps were not compliant to BPMN. He was for sure right, and I bought the book ' BPMN Modeling and reference guide ' that I really encourage people to buy and read to be fluent around BPMN. I was short cutting the approach by looking at presentations you can find on the web. You can get your own interpretation of the notation and got completly wrong. So a reference is always preferable, and with this knowledge you may arrive to design good process, at least process compliant to the intent of this standard. The book is a must to be sure every one understand what a BPMN diagram is representing. Each BPMN modeler tool on the market has his own interpretation or 'add-on' so it is always interesting to get back to the intent of the notation and the reference. The book is illustrated with a lot of samples. Very useful. Thanks again Derek.

Last week I was at Dialog 09, the ILOG customer conference. It was a real success, and real pleasure to see all the BRMS customers presenting how they are able to empower the business users to maintain rules. James is blogging on Dialog , and you can see good summaries there. I was co-presenting effective rule writing, which is still a hot topic for business rule application, and there is some web seminar on this topic as soon as this week . Another important subject is about rule deployment and the different strategies for deploying rules with the IT. I will blog on that soon. The last presentation was on SMABTP , a very successful story on SOA adoption, and BRMS deployment: in 2002, Jean Michel Detavernier (CIO Deputy) has the Vision to embrace SOA at the enterprise level, deploy rules every where and put in place a real agile IT architecture. It is now possible to define new insurance product in days where it was needed months before. There are still customers, architects, and CIO