Today, I gave a presentation on Holacracy and BPM Governance at the “Leadership, Ethics, Productivity” seminar in Laurea Leppävaara, Espoo, Finland.
More compelling, however, was Christopher Evatt’s account on how ethics and values bring about productivity in business. Very much in line with the sociocratic/holacratic principles, he argued for requisite alignment between people and organizations and the importance of co-operation for common goals. With some real life examples, he showcased how extraordinary outcomes can be achieved by setting values, rather than economics, in front.
On a side note, the same principles appear to be applicable at the personal level, too. Having a sound set of values begets the right results far better than an at-any-cost approach to achieve one’s goals. As the Dalai Lama puts it: “Judge your success by what you had to give up in order to get it.”
In the third session of the morning, Anssi Balk gave an introduction to Integral Business embracing a diversity of insights, theories, and practices and connecting each in a manner that strengthens, rather than diminishes, the others. Unfortunately, I had to leave before the presentation and was also unable to attend the Open Seminar in the afternoon.
Today, the fall seminar of Service-Oriented Architecture Subject Interest Group (SOA SIG) took place at the premises of OKO Bank in Vallila, Helsinki, Finland.
The theme of the seminar was Enterprise SOA and different perspectives to Service-Oriented Architecture. Paavo Kotinurmi, Helsinki University of Technology, discussed contemporary research themes, e.g. Semantic SOA, providing an academic perspective. Kimmo Kaskikallio, IBM, provided the perspective of a software vendor; his presentation was abot the life cycle model of SOA and how different tools can support it. Samuel Rinnetmäki, the Finnish Centre for Pensions, brought in the outsourcing perspective and reported on two biddings that FCP has arranged lately. Jouni Lähteenmäki, OKO Bank, represented the perspective of a solution developer and discussed the challenges of SOA development and management. Finally, I provided the perspective of a systems integrator and recounted experiences in BPM implementation projects of EDS.
The day was concluded with a panel discussion that I moderated and which was attended by Paavo Kotinurmi, Jouni Lähteenmäki and Kimmo Kaskikallio. Lähteenmäki viewed the information model of the enterprise as the prerequisite for Enterprise SOA, whereas Kaskikallio called for the interplay between business and IT as the key enabler and Kotinurmi expected the companies to be at a certain maturity level before taking the first steps. All the panelists acknowledged that SOA finds its most fertile ground in heterogeneous, rapidly changing environments.
For a while, the discussion took flight to an outer orbit. Kotinurmi predicted that the trend will be towards ever-easier networking and dynamic and semantic services. Kaskikallio added that, in the future, semantic rules engines will handle process variations in BPM.
I concluded the panel by asking how one should start to build a service-oriented enterprise. Lähteenmäki would start by modeling the core business: what things are modular. Kotinurmi chimed in and said that the technology, per se, should not be the driver, whereas Kaskikallio urged to call IBM.
Today, I gave two presentations at Merito Forum’s seminar “SOA — Lessons Learned and Best Practices in Real World”. The first one was a theoretical introduction to Enterprise BPM and its governance, entitled “Beyond Workflow: Management of Collaborative Processes in Service-Oriented Architecture”, and the second one was a case study about our experiences in a large-scale BPMS implementation.
In the two presentations, I suggested an architecture for enterprise-wide
business process management, discussed technologies pertaining to that architecture, proposed a governance structure for strategic BPM, recounted experiences in an implementation project and provided some insights into best practices of interorganizational collaborative BPM.
The seminar was chaired by Marko Saarinen, Senior Director, Fast Search & Transfer, who also gave a presentation at the end of the day. Unfortunately, I had to leave before learning how Enterprise Search can be used for enabling information access and discovery in SOA.
Other presenters included Ilari Rönnberg, IT Architect, Pedab Software; Mikko Strömberg, IT Architect, Integration Architecture, Konecranes; Samuel Rinnetmäki, Architecture Specialist, The Finnish Centre for Pensions; and as a special guest Mika Helenius, CEO, Ixonos Technology Consulting, who replaced Consulting Director Jari Kekkonen at the last minute.
Mr. Rönnberg gave an Enterprise Architecture perspective to SOA Governance, presented IBM’s SOA Governance Lifecycle and touched upon SOA Governance challenges and capabilities to address these challenges. I was already familiar with the lifecycle model from the slides of IBM’s technology briefing I attended a year ago.
Mr. Helenius argued that SOA should stand for “Strategic Open Architecture”; the designer, integrator and project management of a business architecture undertaking should all be independent and the solutions should be built from business rather than product perspective. He concluded with a quote from Carl Shapiro and Hal Varian: “The idea is to maximize the value of your intellectual property, not its protection.”
Mr. Strömberg gave an interesting case presentation on Konecranes’ SOA strategy and lessons learned in their SOA endeavors. Their integration architecture is based on selected strategic systems, trading off between investment and maintenance costs, and flexible integration between these systems. SOA is employed in new application development. It became clear in the presentation that SOA is seen as a journey that has just begun.
Mr. Rinnetmäki provided another case presentation on how The Finnish Centre for Pensions is designing services for SOA giving insights into service granularity, naming standards, WSDL structure, versioning and documentation.
The seminar was very informative and educational; the small setting also sparked off some great questions and discussion. Based on this experience, I would recommend Merito Forum as an organizer of educational events.
