Agile IT Architecture

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 ...

I just finished a proof of concept for a manufacturing customer on how to use a inference engine to process events coming from a Manufacturing Equipment System. Without breaking any confidential information, I just want to highlight the use cases, the proposed architecture, and give some example of rules. At the high level, the business use cases are real time fault detection and equipment monitoring. Equipments are tools running on the manufacturing floor. The manufacturing tools process parts. After a certain amount of work processed, a tool needs some maintenance and any parts assigned need to be inhibited so the MES can route these Work In Progress parts to equivalent tools. Tool can generate alarms, and the system can take preventive action and/or alert people to avoid bigger problem. So for fault detection a rule looks like: if Alarm_id == 36 then inhibit parts running on tool initiating the alarm, and send email and SMS message to floor manager I have to complete this rule set w...

Gartner says the " Number of Organizations Planning to Adopt SOA for the First Time Is Falling Dramatically ". I will summarize the facts as below: 53% of person contacted are using SOA in some part of their organizations 25 % were not using it but had plans to do so in the next 12 months 16 % no plan to use it 20 % are building Event Driven Architecture 20 % are planning to do EDA in the next 12 months Since the beginning of 2008, there has been a dramatic fall in the number of organizations that are planning to adopt SOA for the first time. down to 25 percent from 53 percent in 2007 Many organizations have evaluated SOA and have chosen not to spend time and effort on it The highest concentrations of organizations not pursuing SOA and having no plans to do so are in process manufacturing and agriculture and mining SOA adoption in Europe is nearly universal, moderate in North America and lagging in Asia Main reasons listed are: No clear business case – but there is a great de...

I just had a look to the presentation from Sandy Kemsley done at the business rule forum: " Mixing Rules and Proces s" and her blog entry on BPMS and BRMS integration. I can quickly summarize the points she made that I love and share some feedback: Does BPM has Rules? yes but typically not full-features BR. Rule changes may require redeploying processes with IT involvement. Separate rules from process: externalize decision from process. Call BRE from BPE. Benefits from separation: compext rules automate manual process, reuse rule across processes, change rule without processes. In her blog entry "As a BPM bigot, I see rules as just another part of the services layer... but I didn’t hear that from any of the vendors." It may be because ILOG team was not speaking... ;-) We are pushing, saying and we are delivering projects since 4 to 5 years where we have a clear separation between decisions done by business rules from process flow, and designing solution where the bu...

Recently I had to re-do some JSR94 code and I'm still interested by this work done some years ago and I'm still supportive of it. But as Roy Johnson was saying recently during one of his presentation "Where will tomorrow's enterprise innovation come from?". Does JSR94 is one of this "unhealthy Java standard" like JDO was? Done in a period where the Java community wanted to standardize everything ? For the recall JSR-94 is an industry standard that defines how Java programs deployed in J2SE or J2EE can acquire and interact with a rule engine. Being able to change engine implementation is a nice design approach, but as of today this specification is limited by the fact that there is still no standard to exchange rule definition between engines. So rule written for one engine can not be used by another one. This dramatic limitation is undermining the use of JSR94. And i'm still surprise to see architect asking compliance to it. Although the horizon is ...