| ------------------------------------- The eBusiness Bulletin e-newsletter of BrainStorm Group August 30, 2001 ------------------------------------- ==================================================== -- INTRODUCTION
We have a lot to tell you about in this week's issue. Our New York conference is just around the corner (September 19-21). For this issue, I spoke with Ismael Ghalimi, Chairman of BPMI.org. His interview discusses BPMI, a standards organization dedicated to furthering the acceptance of the new business process languages BPML and BPQl. There are some very interesting things going on, and Ismael tells us that over 140 businesses have already come together to work with BPMI.org. I also interviewed Ron Phelps from the Kennedy Space Center, where they launch and recover the Space Shuttle. Ron will be presenting a case study in New York on how NASA is working to integrate systems run by almost a thousand engineers. The part of NASA that works on the shuttle has been integrating their systems and they have run into some very complex problems.They have solved them with some very innovative thinking and with help from iWay software and IBM. Finally, my interview with iWay's President, John Senor, will preview the Pre-Conference Seminar iWay and IBM are hosting in New York: "Accelerating E-Business Integration". John explains what iWay and IBM are doing to make application integration quicker and easier. The price is coming down rapidly for integration middleware and iWay/IBM have a lot to offer. They will be discussing several case studies. There is a lot happening in integration. Come to New York and find out for yourself. I'll be available in New York - so let's talk. ================================================== Register Early for BrainStorm Group's eBusiness Integration
In the Expert's corner, we will bring you advice from Ismael Ghalimi is Chairman of BPMI.org and CEO of Intalio, Inc. He co-founded Intalio in 1999 after organizing the first ExoLab Session, an Open Source conference that laid the foundation for upcoming Business Process Management Systems. Ismael authored the first definition of this new enterprise software infrastructure with a white paper published in July 2000. He founded BPMI.org in August 2000. BrainStorm Group is pleased to feature BPMI.org as an eBusiness Integration Conference Series Association Co-Sponsor. Join us in New York where we'll feature Ismael as the BPI Track Chair as well as his presentation on "Business Process Management's Role in E-Business Integration". The main promise of e-business integration is having the ability to manage the whole value chain of groups of businesses who get together in establishing common business goals. Business
Process Management defines the standards, methodologies and technologies that further e-business integration. This process is achieved by the design and deployment of collaborative business processes both internally behind the firewall and externally over the Internet. BACKGROUND Before I get into the interview with Ismael, I need to give you some background on BPMI.org. BPMI.org (Business Process Management Initiative) is a non-profit organization created to promote and develop the use of Business Process Management (BPM) through the establishment of standards for process design. BPMI.org develops open specifications and assists IT vendors for marketing their implementations. Two of the open specifications that BPMI.org defines are them Business Process Modeling Language (BPML), and the Business Process Query Language (BPQL). These will enable standards-based management of e-Business processes with future Business BPML (Business Process Modeling Language) is a meta-language for the modeling of business processes similar to XML being a meta-language for the modeling of business data. BPQL (The Business Process Query Language) defines a standard interface to future Business Process Management Systems. It allows system administrators to manage the business processes and business analysts to query the instances of business processes. BPMI.org is presenting these new languages as an implementation that can be used right now, similar to what UDDI is doing. THE INTERVIEW Ismael told me that he would be covering the vision of BPMI.org for business process management using BPML and some additional technologies that would be announced just before the New York conference begins. Ismael considers business process integration to be a piece of business process management, which is defined as the design, deployment, execution, maintenance and interaction with business processes. Business process integration means you want to integrate that business process both with back end applications and your own business partners. Ismael described the creation of BPML as a high level language that allows business partners to share business processes that go from the very back end all the way through to your partners for true end-to-end service. BPML is used to design these processes. BPMI.org works with application vendors so these business processes can be tightly integrated with their existing ERP applications. Even though work on the language only began a year ago, the response has been quite good. One reason being that the language can be used right now, even while it is being improved and added to. Ismael told me that he has seen a lot of pragmatism because of the economic downturn and that companies are focusing on their core competencies and using business process management as a way to better understand their businesses and increase their efficiencies.
They are adopting these new methodologies for specific processes that have a proven ROI. They are focusing on individual areas and moving on as they handle each one. Ismael wanted me to say that it is important to remember that business process management is a top down approach that is dictated by business requirements that have been requested by business people. It is altogether different from a bottom-up approach, starting with integrating IT and your enterprise applications and then maybe adding some workflow on top of that. The clear message he gives is that BPMI is driven by business decisions and is very different from EAI plus workflow which is driven by IT requirements. Deciding which applications are to be integrated, and why, are business decisions and need to be part of the business process management approach. Ismael has seen that people have very specific business goals in mind such as reducing cycle time or cutting costs. This is an example of a top down approach and BPM consists of methodologies and technologies that implement this. This presentation will appeal to business analysts, integration architects and directors of process engineering within large companies across multiple verticals such as manufacturing, healthcare, transportation and the like. The talk will also appeal to the CIOs and IT managers who have the task of implementing any new process. Ismael Ghalimi will be in New York to answer any questions you have about this new business process initiative. Register today!! ================================================== ==================================================== In my interview with Ron Phelps, Project Manager, of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) we discussed his role at NASA as the Shuttle Processing Directorate at Kennedy Space Center. Catch Ron's entire Case Study Presentation on September 19 at our New York eBusiness Integration Conference. This Case Study is hosted by event sponsors: iWay Software, an Information Builders Company and IBM. As the starting point for all U.S. human space flights and in charge of the launch and payload processing of the Space Shuttle, KSC, has an important and very public mission. KSC needs faster, better and less expensive development and operations of space systems. NASA needed to integrate information between databases and computer platforms, without requiring users to add a new application for viewing the data. HANDLING THE TURN-AROUND ON THE SHUTTLE DIFFERENTLY Ron spends his time mainly looking at data other people create. In earlier days, NASA contractors and engineers worked hand in hand with NASA overseeing and coordinating that everything was done right and on time. Several years ago NASA decided to change the way they did business and let the contractors handle more and more of the daily operations. They call the new way of overseeing this effort, "insight". This involved moving the NASA people out of the field and letting the contractors do their work without much of the previous oversight. This didn't relieve the contractors of the responsibility for making sure the shuttle was processed correctly prior to launch. But being inside instead of out, the engineers have to rely more on the data that is being processed rather than their own eyes and ears. The insight system is the tool that allows them access to the data and presents the data through different reports so that the engineers can see how the process is going. Most of the data comes from the United Space Alliance, who does much of the work on the shuttle. What NASA had to do was to integrate all of their various reports and databases. The data was in five different databases on seven different operating systems. They converted all the databases into SQL, with the goal of having all the data be available to the engineers in 15 seconds or less and have it available through the Web. They presently have over 300 engineers on the integrated system but when it all gets going there will be over a thousand in the user community. They have 8000 baseline requirements for the data. THE HUMAN ISSUE People collect the data in a number of ways. Rather than try to force a bunch of testy engineers to standardize on one system, NASA told them what data they needed then let the engineers collect the data any way they wanted to and put it into any system they were comfortable with. The only requirement was that NASA had access to the data when it was done. One of the really major problems that they had to deal with during this transition is that the integrators don't own the data. So they have to ask for it, and they had to be very careful during this process because the owners of the data are the ones who set the security levels. If NASA needs data they don't have, they have to go to the owners and make a case for being given the permissions to see that data. Ron said it has been a real learning experience. There were a lot of islands of information and many did not want to share their data because of the possibility the data could be corrupted or that the overseers could find problems in the data that would reflect badly on the people who created it. Ron told me they had to create a "no blame" process to overcome these objections. This "human issue" is one of the essential points of integrating that is overlooked in many initiatives. There are islands of information in every organization, and there are people who are used to being accountable in a certain way and don't want to change. Integrating changes all the traditional processes. One of the big reasons projects fail is that this human issue is ignored. You have to convince people they won't be worse off by sharing their data. NASA had to assure the users that any anomalies they found wouldn't be used to beat up on them. They set up a process to sit down with the contractors and engineers to find out what the numbers were actually saying and why they were looking at it differently when these cases arose. NASA recognized this problem early on and continues to deal with it. Ron told me he still has to deal with people who think the only answer is to get everyone onto one big massive database that will house all the data. HOW IT'S WORKING They have been working on this effort for three years, although not consistently until 2000. They began by just putting the technology out there and letting everyone get used to it. They tried one process that nobody liked, so they abandoned it and asked the engineers what they preferred and created a new system based on those suggestions. They initially chose a product suite that would work with any process - so they did not have to junk anything during the effort - even after they started over. Ron said they had to go against a lot of conventional thinking during this integration project, but that it's working. Currently NASA is moving to turn their initiative into a total knowledge management system. Ron will address what knowledge management means to NASA and just how they are going to define and implement it and the challenges they are running into. It's hard to put a dollar figure on the results, but they have seen significant time savings already. One metric report that took two weeks to put together, now only takes fifteen minutes. This particular report was done by a group of engineers who were using Microsoft. The data the group needs is brought to them already in an Excel spreadsheet. Ron said the important thing here is giving the people what they need in the format they want to have it in. VALUABLE INSIGHTS FOR ANY INTEGRATION PROJECT The main thing NASA has learned is that they needed to allow the people to collect the data in the way they want to and in the application they were comfortable with. They started small until everyone was familiar with the new way of doing things. In the process of doing this, they have developed the capability to do a lot of integration in a seamless manner and have avoided large unwieldy and difficult to implement applications. NASA has overcome a lot of problems that everyone runs into when they get involved with an integration initiative. Ron will also talk about the shuttle itself and tell you what it is really like to work on a space ship. ==================================================== Join us in New York for the eBusiness Integration Conference Pre-Conference Seminar: Accelerating E-Business Integration. Featuring John Senor, President, iWay Software and Information Builders Company and David B. White, IBM Americas Software ***** John Senor is the president of iWay Software and a well-known visionary in the middleware and enterprise integration marketplace. John sets the corporate strategy for iWay, working closely with the company's partners, customers and executives to reach into new market segments and expand the company's global reach. John will be hosting this seminar along with David White of IBM. Together they will show how iWay Software provides standard connections to over 120 back-office systems, helping to reduce the time, money, and effort for traditional integration projects up to 80%. They will demonstrate how to employ new integration technologies while deploying a stable, flexible and reusable infrastructure. John began by telling me that most people are surprised at how difficult and skill-intensive integration projects can be. Integrating complex applications today is difficult and making the back end systems work is the hardest part. IWay and IBM use technologies that significantly reduce this complexity and the amount of custom code that needs to be written. iWay has focused on is middleware that doesn't need custom configuration but relies on drop-in, plug and play applications. iWay has had a long partnership with IBM that goes back more than a decade. Their integration solution also works with non-IBM products, which is necessary nowadays since everyone has hundreds of different applications. The IBM products are the core of the middleware used. John said that even though there is a jungle of applications out there, integrating the applications isn't the hard part. The most difficult thing is integrating the 50,000 custom applications you wrote yourself that are running on dozens of different platforms. Interfaces have to be custom coded to each one of these applications. John told me that the focus on enterprise integration is the number one thing on the minds of CIOs today. This is what they are being asked to do. But they are being asked to do more with less. They want to utilize information technology, and specifically the Internet, to make their business more efficient internally and externally. Doing more with less, John pointed out, means being able to reuse the information assets your company already has for new business purposes. CEOs and CFOs understand the frustrations of new initiatives costing too much and taking too long to develop. They also know the direction their businesses need to go. What they don't want to hear is that they half to hire an army of consultants and write a lot of custom integration code in order to make it all work, and also having to create the expertise to maintain it. Customers want software to do the work, not customware. There is always some customizing needed, but businesses want it kept to a minimum because they now know how high the bill for custom applications can get. They want the integration initiative to be a configuration and assembly effort. The major drawback to integration today is the amount of custom services that many large integration applications require. One of the main advantages of the IBM/iWay product is that it requires less customization. INTEGRATION MARKET RAMPING UP The pie in the sky days of the Internet bubble are over. During that time there were lots of promises hung on to a few tools that required a lot of custom code and couldn't scale. Companies spent too much on applications that did too little, simply because they were told they had to. While they do have to do it, buyers are a lot more savvy now about what the applications will do, and they are very wary of hype. They want flexibility and the ability to launch an initiative without having to invest in all new skill sets. John says we are beyond the "sticker shock" phase of enterprise application integration, and that buyers are demanding results they can quantify. He says this is a good time to do it because there are a number of really good products out there and that prices are coming down. John said that whenever we go through a major shakeout like we have seen, we always come out with a different focus. The dot com burnout forced a change in the way we looked at our applications and our businesses in general. This seminar is targeted to senior IT professionals, integration architects and managers who are responsible for delivering fully integrated business and e-business solutions to the enterprise. The participants will be shown the tools and will also be able to figure their own ROI for an integration project using these technologies. It will be focused around why accelerated integration is fundamental for market leadership. Case studies for companies such as NASA, FedEx, and Bell Canada will be highlighted, showing how they are integrating e-business applications at all levels within their businesses. They will also cover how to employ new integration technologies to expand your enterprise quickly and effectively using web applications, mobile devices, and messaging technologies like MQSeries, XML, and Java and how to quickly deploy a cost-effective back-end infrastructure that can be reused. The Seminar on Accelerating E-Business Integration, starts off Wednesday, September 19 at 9:00.
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