Category — BPM 2.0

Funny how this blogging stuff works. The minute you post something, soon after I usually find something similar or something that enhances or detracts from what I was writing about. Fortunately, this one may greatly enhance my post!

I talked about having an arsenal full of instrumentation, data and information collecting tools in yesterday’s posting YGE, NW? Part IV: Mapping Events to What’s Important and Your Message. I mentioned using the normal NMS/EMS/OSS/BSS tools, logfiles, scripts, database triggers and stored procedures, etc. to help collect metrics and KPI/KPM and turn them into events for processing upstream.

I came across another potentially useful approach that may make this instrumentation and collection process significantly easier in the future by using Really Simple Synidcation (RSS) to create a service bus (not ESB). Their goals is to accomplish what has been reserved in the past large companies with large IT staff and large IT budgets - easy integration and sharing of data between applications, services, etc.

The company, RSSBus, is in pre-release mode still and has a white paper available discussing their approach aimed at greatly simplifying integration, access and sharing of information.

I think this has great potential for enabling “the rest of us” to instrument the business and use that important data and information to create rich dashboards and portals and maybe even powerful BSM/BAM/BPM implementations. Imagine subscribing to dashboard feeds, business activity monitoring feeds, etc. Something like Pageflakes could become the enterprise BSM dashboard portal fed by numerous business, technology, people, process and operations feeds. Could this be the start to Web2.0 solutions in these areas?

Some highlights from the whitepaper:

“With RSSBus, our goal is to offer a simple, easy alternative for the small organization with little to no IT assets, little to no professional development tools, and no professional programmers to use them.”

“What we are building is something different, a service platform for the rest of us, the nonacronym-speaking crowd. If you have bits of pieces of data that you would like to quickly exchange with and/or connect to other systems, if simplicity and ease of use is your most important consideration, please read on.”

“With RSSBus, our goal is to build general purpose software that connects or has the ability to easily connect to every system, data, or information source of any significance. Our core focus is to enable connectivity as simply and as easily as possible, and we believe our experience building networking software components and connectivity toolkits for the past decade, and the software assets we have created in the process, give us a unique advantage.”

I’m keeping these guys on my radar to see how their ideas and products develop. No indications as to availability, costs (open source?), etc. yet.

Now that you’ve identified the sources of what’s important within your environment and crafted that data and information into messages that prompt action and decision making, it’s time to think about getting this data and information into a manageable format for processing and visualization.

I’ve discussed what events are and shared some initial thoughts on building events for BSM here and included references to complex event processing (CEP), event driven architecture (EDA) and event stream processing (ESP) here. I still plan on diving in deep to the topic of building events and the idea of the Common Base Event and Common Event Format. I also want to introduce the Event Data Dictionary / Event Catalog which will be useful for capturing information about what events exist in your environment and why. Every event that’s generated should be done so for a purpose. There’s nothing that will turn your NOC or IT support group against you quicker than if you’re collecting data and generating events just for the sake of doing so because they may be available via and SNMP MIB or agent. They don’t need any more “noise” to deal with during the day.

There may be many ways to incorporate this data and information into the messages you’re planning to communicate. The approaches and their ease of use are going to be entirely up to the tools, applications and solutions you’re using. You may be able to establish direct connections with the datasource, perform screen scrapes, import spreadsheets, or even perform queries against the source. The general concept of this series of articles has been around the assumption that you have the ability within your environment to generate events. Generating events usually comes through some form of instrumentation, collection and evaluation against a threshold, state, rule, etc.

What I want to talk about here is instrumenting those sources of important information, data and metrics within your environment you’ve identified as you completed your Metrics Catalog. Some of these sources may be outside the comfort zone or capabilities of the average IT Operations group normally used to operating with SNMP, server and application monitoring agents.

Since you’ve identified the source of the important information or data, how frequently it gets updated, and how to access it you’re half way there. The next task is to identify the person(s) or group(s) responsible for that information source. This may be the owner, administrator or support group for the application, tool, file, spreadsheet, database, server, etc. that produces, evaluates, communicates or makes available that information or data. The task here is to establish the business need with the owner to instrument that source so that the important data or information is provided in a way that can be easily processed upstream.

Once you’ve established the business need, you can have a discussion about the best way to instrument the information source and generate those events. Discuss the various tools in your event generating arsenal with the owner and their technical staff. Cover the normal EMS/NMS/OSS/BSS solutions and their capabilities for collecting information and generating events. Discuss more generic approaches such as log files (application, system, etc.), scripts, XML/SOAP/WebServices, etc. Scripts can be written to parse logs or collect other information from applications, GUIs, command lines, etc. and pass those off to an event generation function. If you’ve been able to consolidate information into a database or corporate data warehouse, consider leveraging database triggers and stored procedures to collect, format and generate an event. There are certainly more sophisticated methods available here if your organization leverages an EAI or ESB technology. Just keep in mind that the goal is to keep it simple, efficient and effective. You don’t want to be blamed for causing a performance slowdown or outage to that important business application!

You’ll want to map the events you’re generating into the appropriate format of your internal systems that will process them. Be sure to capture the relationship between these event types and their purpose for communicating an important metric, KPI/KPM, etc. At a minimum, one of the fields in the event format should be the Metric ID from the Metrics Catalog. This will be critical in linking the events to their purpose. The more thought and planning you put into how you build these events the better. Consider the use of an enumeration schema to capture information. This can be parsed and evaluated later by other solutions such as dashboard, BSM, BAM, BPM, rules or workflow solutions. An example may be populating a field in an event like this: “A1-2-3″ which may represent Metric Source = A1 (CRM System), Metric ID = 2 (Customer Count) and Metric Update = 3 (Daily). The sky’s the limit here but do consider the impact these may have on your internal event processing solutions or those that will need to parse and evaluate the enumeration schema you create.

Spend some time testing and evaluating the effectiveness of the new instrumentation you’ve done. Follow up with the owners you identified and the business to make sure that the data, information, metrics, etc. you’re now collecting passes their “sniff tests”. They’ll have a fairly good understanding of what’s good or bad - they always seem to have a sixth sense about this. If you get the sense that this information isn’t accurate, useful or otherwise have them excited, immediately start to evaluate why and do whatever you can to remedy it. You absolutely do not want to be presenting bad information later!

Now that we’ve got these important bits of data, information, metrics, etc. being collected and processed by our internal systems and tools automatically, it’s time to think about visualizing our message effectively for our various audiences. Stay tuned for that topic in “You’ve Got Events, Now What? Part V: Visualizing the Message.

Catch up with the “You’ve Got Events, Now What?” series here.

Just wanted to highlight this concept I introduced in the “You’ve Got Events, Now What?” series this week on collecting and organizing metrics for use in commuicating a message via a dashboard, report, graph, chart, etc.

I haven’t seen anything like this before in a vendor product or messaging. I’d think it could be a part of a service catalog. If you’ve seen something like this, add to the conversation!

See the post here where I’ve introduced the concept and include a sample “Metrics Catalog” spreadsheet.

Bruce Silver, who coined the term BPM 2.0 some time ago, has been blogging on the topic at IT|Redux for some time. Bruce has started a new blog BPMS Watch yesterday with the post called “BPM Immaturity Model Unveiled”. Follow Bruce’s thoughts and participate in the BPMS discussion!

I believe BPM 2.0 will be a key enabler of BSM/ITSM and best practice success! Standardized and repeatable IT processes, procedures and activities must be automated, managed and monitored leveraging tried and true technologies available today. Process events, feedback events, business events coupled with infrastructure (network, system, app) events come together to provide complete visibility into e2e processes and activities ensuring success and expected outcome (aligned with business objectives, goals).

David A. Kelly at ebizQ.net writes a good article on this topic here. He points out some of the challenges often found in large companies (I dealt with many of these over the past year!) and how solutions such as BPM, BSM, BAM, etc. are tools companies may invest in to continuously improve their business in the future.

There are some very tangible benefits from business process management (BPM) and how its tenants can be used to help document, model, and support real time business service management (BSM), business activity monitoring (BAM) and help align IT with business.

The concept of BPM 2.0 was coined by Bruce Silver and first implemented by company called Intalio. From what I’ve read on their website and on the ITRedux blog there may be some very exciting opportunities here to leverage their open source (free) platform as an enabling technology for BSM and BAM (which they’ve embedded into their product!).

The BPMS concept introduced here by Ismael Ghalimi, CEO of Intalio.

I’ve created a BPM Defined page to capture relevant information on BPM, BPEL, BPMN, etc. for future reading and research.

What staffing skills and resources are required to implement BSM? Who can operate at all levels and in all business units within an organization and effectively collect requirements and turn them into implementation tasks?

It’s probably not your average tools person…

Ideas?

• Process Engineering / Modelling
• Flowcharting
• Swimlanes
• BPEL
• BPMN / BPMN
• BPMI
• Visio (or similar) design and layout - export to tool
• What must tools and solutions vendors provide to enable a BSM Analyst?
• They (the tool admin) must perform the heavy lifting, integration and data management tasks so the BSM Analyst can map the business information properly.
• I envision a WYSIWYG drag and drop environment similar to web publishing tools that exist today where the nuts and bolts are abstracted from the user as much as possible. The analyst then has a platform for layout, mapping and visualization of the key information to communicate the appropriate message.