SOMF

An article has just appeared on Wikipedia advertising something called The Service-Oriented Modelling Framework, based on a new book by one Michael Bell. Advertisements are usually excised from Wikipedia fairly speedily, so the article may not last long.

According to the article, Bell has invented a modelling process and language for SOA that is both anthropomorphic and holistic. If this is true, it is a remarkable achievement. Most modelling languages are materialist and reductionist - they describe certain aspects of the system-of-interest by reducing them to objects. Whereas an anthropomorphic model would ascribe human characteristics (e.g. personalities and desires) to the system-of-interest.

I guess I need to read the book when it comes out. Perhaps the publishers would care to send me a review copy?

Business Process

An interesting debate behind the scenes at Wikipedia about the nature of the Business Process [article, discussion] involving Keith Swenson (Fujitsu and WfMC), Kai Simon (Gartner) and myself. 

Kai had contributed a definition of Business Process to Wikipedia: "A business process is a set of linked activities that create value by transforming an input into a more valuable output." 

Keith objected that this definition assumed an "information system" view of the world, and was not necessarily valid for office work. How do activities such as document approval or answering the telephone fit into this definition? What happens if two people approve a document for different purposes? 

Document approval and answering the telephone are presumably useful to the business - otherwise why would the business employ people to perform them? Perhaps they create value in some way - an approved document is worth more than an unapproved document; an answered telephone more than an unanswered telephone. 

But Keith is correct to point out the potential complexities of this way of viewing business process. If there are n people who may approve a document, then there are potentially 2-to-the-power-n approval states of the document. (In this case it might be easier to regard the approval instead as a separate entity.) And once the document has been approved (by manager A), does a second act of approval (by manager B) confer any additional value? 

Understanding the business process as a chain of value-adding activities is a popular and useful view, often attributed to Michael Porter and not only found in IT. But this view (modelling perspective) has some limitations, and it is certainly not the only way of understanding the business process. It is particularly problematic with management processes, such as command and control or strategic planning, whose value depends on some indirect calculation. 

For developing service-oriented architectures and systems, it is often useful to think of the business process more abstractly in terms of events and capabilities, rather than a particular value chain. Even within IT this view provides a useful alternative to the value-chain perspective, and allows us to analyse the requirements for management systems (including business intelligence) as well as transaction systems.

Wikipedia

The Wikipedia article on Service-Oriented Architecture is a real mess at the moment. Which is a pity, because Wikipedia is the first place many people look for simple explanations.

Obviously there are lots of vested interests and egos involved, which may make it more difficult for a high-quality article to emerge from Wikipedia's apparently anarchistic editing process. Can the service engineering community reach agreement?

Looking around Wikipedia, I found lots of (overlapping and possibly inconsistent) articles and stubs on related topics. Most of these need a lot of editorial work. As a first step, I created a category of Service Engineering to group these articles together.

Given the way Wikipedia works, someone immediately challenged this category. So I need your help. Please look at the articles grouped under the service engineering category and consider (1) whether these articles do indeed have something in common and if so (2) whether "service engineering" is a reasonable name for this category. Please contribute your opinion to the Wikipedia Talk page for this category. (Anonymous contributions are accepted, but signed contributions tend to carry more weight.)

Update

I originally preferred the term "service engineering" to the more widely used (and abused) term "service-oriented". However, Wikipedia editorial policy is based on the criterion of notability. The service engineering category has been deleted and replaced with a category called Service-oriented (business computing).