Agile IT Architecture

Redbook on WODM 7.5

noreply@blogger.com (JBoy) — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 22:03:00 +0000

A new redbook was just release about WebSphere Operational Decision Manager, which is JRules renamed, and integrated with the event processing of Websphere business event.
The book can be seen here
The two products are now using the same language construct delivered by JRules business rule language definition framework. Event processing rules complete the current if <> then <> rule structure and open the door to interesting applications. The next step is to make architects thinking about Event Driven Architecture by instrumenting application to generate event of interest, and adopt a publish and subscribe model. Not yet there. The good news is that from a SOA service is not that complex to generate events so an event processing engine can correlate, aggregate them.
I have the chance to review this redbook, and I love the fact that it is not just BPM. I'm tired to get 'industry expert' mixing rule engine with BPM and saying everything is a business process problem...
Also rule processing (event or inference) should be part of the service in SOA, with a different life cycle of development and maintenance. The schema presented on that subject in the book are highlighting. Great job to Pierre Berlandier and Duncan Clark for their hard work.

BPM used as monolithic L4G

noreply@blogger.com (JBoy) — Tue, 27 Dec 2011 22:26:00 +0000

With my last months studying BPM products, I'm quite impressed by product marketing fliers and other 'best pratices'/ training materials putting emphasis to the fact that traditional, code driven, approach to develop business application is bad, and with BPM it is better to have a unique artifact in a central repository, for managing all the elements of a business application such as UI, information model, service definitions, connectors, business rules, process logic.
I'm confused by the lack of applying basic design and architecture best practices such as separation of concern, and artifact life cycle. With monolithic process application, any change to the information model, or the UI enforce migrating all the process instances running on the runtime server. This is interesting to note that SOA reference architecture, defines, UI services separated from process, from data, and rules services. Which makes perfectly sense for re usability, components life cycle, flexible, sustainable architecture.
Do not apply bad patterns because of such BPM product, use BPM for workflow orchestration, visibility into your process, monitoring the business activities inside the process, and think about valuable architecture and design, and do not blindly follow marketing sirens.

New post on Book companion web site

noreply@blogger.com (JBoy) — Tue, 15 Nov 2011 05:55:00 +0000

Hi
I start now to add content to the book - companion web site. So point to agilebrdevelopment
Have fun

JRules is not a graphical programming environment

noreply@blogger.com (JBoy) — Thu, 11 Aug 2011 18:26:00 +0000

I got to review a JRules project recently where the developer did used JRules as a graphical programming tool, and not implement rules leveraging the inference and the capability of the rule language. The ruleflow has around 15 subflows that look all like the picture below.

The approach chosen was to loop around a collection of expenses and to apply rules in the "Expense" rule task using a variable named 'current expense'. A rule in the Expense rule task, looks like the following statement:
if
'current expense' has attendee
then
<... do something >
else
print "Expense had no person attached to it" ;

First a ruleflow should be used to control the flow of execution of group of rules, grouped together to apply business logic. A ruleflow should not be used as a UI for programming logic. A rule flow stays simple. What is interesting is that JRules as the definitions part in the BAL rules with operator 'in' to navigate collection of objects. The logic addressed in this flow is in fact really one line in the definition part of the rule. Using this capability we can remove 15 subflow, makes the rules far more efficient and gain on execution performance.

definitions
set 'current expense' to an Expense in 'all expenses received';
if
it is not true that 'current expense' has attendee
then
add error: "Attendee not present" to 'list of errors';

In this rule the variable 'current expense' will get all the references to the instance of the Expense class in the list of expenses received. Therefore the pattern matching in the if part of the rule will be done on this local variable. No more need to complex loop in the ruleflow...

I just wanted to share this with you, as this may be helpful to others. As a rule of thumb as soon as your ruleflow looks like spaghetti code, there is something fishy in the implementation. Most of the time the developer did not understand how a rule engine is working and how to leverage the different rule language operators. The product documentation is very good, with samples, and tutorials. Spending some time to understand rule programming will help avoid such pitfall.

On You Tube

noreply@blogger.com (JBoy) — Thu, 11 Aug 2011 18:21:00 +0000

I'm not yet lady gaga but here is a video done at Impact 2011.
I know I have a strong french accent....

ABRD EPF link updates

noreply@blogger.com (JBoy) — Thu, 11 Aug 2011 18:10:00 +0000

Hi
Just want to update the ABRD reference: EPF 1.5.1.2 practice library is available here and contains the last version of ABRD.
A published version of ABRD can be found at http://epf.eclipse.org/wikis/epfpractices/ then go on the left to the following folder:
Practices > Additional Practices > Agile business rule development.

IBM BPM7.5

noreply@blogger.com (JBoy) — Tue, 07 Jun 2011 19:28:00 +0000

Last Friday IBM BPM 7.5 made GA. This is a great product, with a lot of exiting features in it. This week I'm doing a self training on it. BPM, BPMN, SCA, JRules integration.
For more information go to IBM BPM

Impact 2011

noreply@blogger.com (JBoy) — Mon, 11 Apr 2011 13:30:00 +0000

IBM Impact 2011 is starting with a lot of announcements in BPM space. I will have a session wednesday morning, 10.30am called: "Harvesting Business Terminology and Rules using WebSphere ILOG BRMS", with Stephane Mery, an eminent colleague working on business rule language.
We introduce ABRD and the harvesting cycle, and we go over how to quickly use ILOG BRMS to prototype the vocabulary and the rules.
Also I will have a signing session for the book at 12,00pm at the bookstore. Come to see...

Jazz and RTC 3.0 for your project

noreply@blogger.com (JBoy) — Thu, 24 Mar 2011 13:21:00 +0000

Rational Team Concert 3.0 and previous version provide an excellent environment to develop business application using an agile methodology, and global team. I'm working on a project with resources in china, and multiple States in USA. Creating plan, iteration, work items is very easy and make the production and communication between remote team member very efficient.
Have a look at Jazz here
and the manual here

Agile Business Rule Development book ready

noreply@blogger.com (JBoy) — Wed, 23 Mar 2011 04:34:00 +0000

My silence on this blog is due to the work on my book, I co authored with Hafedh. The book is now available as you can see on Springer site.
The book is about ABRD methodology, architecture, best practices for developing business rule application.
I will give more information later. Have fun reading it!.
My silence is also due to my current consulting engagements with IBM, so I do not want to say anything about my projects. Also I still need to figure out what I can say outside of IBM.... Learning the business policies of my new company...

RuleFest 2010

noreply@blogger.com (JBoy) — Mon, 11 Oct 2010 20:11:00 +0000

Hi
I will share a lunch time slot with Daniel Selman, tuesday 10/12 at RuleFest to present the Agile business rules development methodology, and how to leverage it for your own project.
I would love to see more projects using BRMS and rule technology as early as possible in the SDLC life cycle, than doing months of documentation.... I undertstand the SI goals to spend, burn hours on documentation work, but the value is on executable rules that brings value to the business quickly, and the business users being able to change these rules as he wants. Documentation never made good software. Good code does. Good business rules too.
See you at RuleFest.

New release of ABRD 1.5.1

noreply@blogger.com (JBoy) — Sat, 09 Oct 2010 21:08:00 +0000

You can find a new release of Eclipse Process Framework, practices library, and ABRD. A published version is available at http://www.eclipse.org/downloads/download.php?file=/technology/epf/OpenUP/published/abrd_published_1.5.1_20101007.zip

Still working on the book.

Policies and Rules – Improving business agility articles

noreply@blogger.com (JBoy) — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 23:05:00 +0000

There are two new articles about business rules and business policies on developer work which may my readers. I participate deeply in this paper when joining IBM last year. Most of the concepts are known, and some are part of ABRD.
Part 1 deals with terms, abstract concepts and relationships, Part 2 describes techniques for applying the concepts to business problems.
Please feel free to comment here.

How to find decision point

noreply@blogger.com (JBoy) — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 05:10:00 +0000

In ABRD we propose to start the rule harvesting process by looking at decision points. Recently I have a question from a business user, on how to extract the decision point. So let give some practices I'm using.

A decision point is a task in a business process or a step in the use case that involve decision to be taken. When looking at a task description it is important to search for mental thinking verb, most of the time there is a set of knowledge to apply to execute this task, which leads to decision. This could be human knowledge or business logic implementation in a software component. The type of decision will most likely be a reject or accept of the business event or flag it for future processing downstream in the business process. The decision may also include some computational expressions to assign value to attribute of the business transaction.

Therefore to find decision point in a business process or use case description start by searching for verb like analyze, check, validate, evaluate, verify. You can also leverage industry model and business process description. When there is a human task and conditional node you can expect to find decision point there. A human task can also sub decomposed in an automatic task which perform the main stream of decisioning and the exception done by the expert. In most business process there is the existence of validation step to ensure data quality: those steps are source for business rules. Decision point enforces the execution of business rules. The implementation can be done in different technology depending of the type of rule.

It is recommended to define the interface of each decision point and then consider the implementation choice later. Using rule engine technology is the best choice when business users want to change the business logic over time, to enforce auditability to trace the decisions done on a given business event. During the inception phase the project team is doing business modeling activities which aim at describing the business process and decisions applied to any business events supported by the application. Decision points are extracted at that moment and logged in the decision point table.

BlueWorks

noreply@blogger.com (JBoy) — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 17:18:00 +0000

In the last few weeks, I have to work for developing more content of the process track of ISIS and ABRD. I have to study and develop artifacts for business modeling activities using IBM BlueWorks. BlueWorks is a hosted set of applications used by business analysts to discover and model business-relevant content used in a BPM deployment. A user can create elements like Strategy map, Organization Map, and BPM model in BPMN. The tools are simple to use, and give good starting point for business process implementation. Those tools are in the palette of good tools for a process analyst.

BlueWorks is more than just a group of tools. It is also a knowledge sharing platform, where users can learn about BPM products and best practices and they can get presentation of successful deployments. It is a very nice environment to learn but also to collaborate.
In term of useful tools a user can go to the Business Leaders environment to create the following artifacts:

Strategy Map: defining, planning, and communicating the overall strategy of an organization.
Capability Plan: Business capabilities define what your business does, such as the services it provides to customers, or the operational functions it performs for employees.
Business Process Map

Everything on the web. This kind of applications is really showing the future of business application: hosted, accessible over the web. Google Wave is another proof point to this trend where people can collaborate and learn in real time.
Register and try it. You can add comments and your findings to this blog too.

Working on ABRD-JRules book

noreply@blogger.com (JBoy) — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 17:15:00 +0000

Just to update I'm still working on the future book about Agile Business Rule Development and JRules. It takes sometime taking into account the hard work we have to do with our current integration of ILOG within IBM.
This blog is not dead. And I should be able to spend more time on it in the future weeks.

Service Component Architecture

noreply@blogger.com (JBoy) — Wed, 20 May 2009 23:25:00 +0000

Discussing about agile IT architecture on this blog without going to SCA will be a major error. I'm playing with SCA since last September, and I love it.
Service Component Architecture is defined as the implementation of the SOA architecture. You can read an excellent paper from David Chappell on this subject. SCA separates application business logic and the implementation details. It provides a model that defines interfaces, implementations, and references in a technology neutral way, letting us to bind these elements to any technology specific implementation.

For the business case and business user point of views the value propositions are around:
- Save time and money
- A simpler API, Efficient GUI tools to assemble components to build new application
- Enable and encourage reuse - Developers can create composites that perform useful functions. SCA makes it easy to use and reuse business logic.
- Bring agility to interchange business logic
- Bring visibility on how the application is built. I can imagine easily using the assembly diagrams to explain how 'business' components work together in the context of the current application.

On the architecture level the ability to separate business logic from infrastructure logic reduces the IT resources needed to build an enterprise application, and gives developers more time to work on solving a particular business problem rather than focusing on the details of which implementation technology to use.
Some key concepts:
A component implements some business logic exposed as one or more services that operate on business data. Component includes an implementation, and can have partner references and interfaces.

A component can indicate the services it relies on using references. Explicitly defining references allows dependency injection, the SCA runtime can locate the needed service and injects the reference into the component which needs it.
Components are bring together within an assembly or composite. The composite is persisted as an XML document using the Service Component Description Language (SCDL).

A component can also define one or more properties. Each property contains a value that can be read by that component from the SCDL configuration file when it’s instantiated. Finally a domain can contain one or more composites, each of which has components implemented in one or more processes running on one or more machines.

On the tools and implementation side, IBM for sure has an impressive offering on that space with WebSphere Integration Developer. Apache Tuscany is also an excellent open source to help us jumping into the technology and understand how it works. Eclipse Ganymede is offering an assembly editor, SCA project plugin...

We will build our AML application using SCA

AML with Event processing and Rule Engine

noreply@blogger.com (JBoy) — Wed, 13 May 2009 17:08:00 +0000

I have to build a demo and a presentation (co -presented) for IBM WebSphere Impact 09 on how business rules and business event work together in the context of Anti Money Laundering. James Taylor did a good summary on his blog.
I promised some time ago on this blog to go through a complete example of executing ABRD on a project. So lets take this demo as a main example. Lets start with this first blog on a short description of AML and its high level process.

AML business context:

Money Laundering is the act of hiding illegally earned money from police and tax authority by making illicit funds appear as initiated from legal business. The Money laundering is a three step process. The first step, called ‘placement’, is done by depositing illicit funds in a business bank account. If one makes a cash deposit above 10000$ the bank is required to report the transaction to the government. The next step is called ‘layering’, wherein funds are moved from bank to bank and consolidated. The last step is the ‘integration’, where the funds are reintroduced to the financial system as ‘clean money’.

The first defense against money laundering is the requirement on financial intermediaries to know their customers— often termed KYC (Know Your Customer). Knowing his customers, financial intermediary will often be able to identify unusual or suspicious behaviors, including false identities, unusual transactions, changing behavior, or other indicators of laundering.
Placement rules should be able to detect deposit structuring by one or more individuals at various bank locations within a day or over time; notably this can also include ATMs. Large wire remittance customers, such as Money Service Business, will deposit cash more often and in greater volumes than typical customers.

Rules to detect large cash placements, using various methods and locations, in a single day, week, or month, would therefore be well-suited for monitoring.

Layering rules should identify bogus loans to offshore entities which never repaid the funds or the loan paid off in cash.

Current auditing happens manually where the auditor examines data output from legacy application and search for cash transactions over a period of time. The goal is to migrate to a continuous monitoring with software component which will alert auditors for suspicious activities. Banks need to be aware of all of the financial transactions that make up a ML. The critical knowledge to manage is the associations between such transactions.

The first step of a business process modeling approach is to work on the business process.

The high level process can be seen with 4 steps:

Detect fraud pattern
Analyze pattern
Investigate customer
Report on fraud

The detection of ML pattern is looking to different sources of information like the transactions, the customer accounts, the loan servicing applications, and looking at pattern of behaviors leading to potential Money Laundering. The detection of pattern is done with a time window constraint. A person making cash deposit on a yearly or monthly basis may not be a ML. A person doing cash deposit regularly without business motivation may be a fraudulent. The analysis is a sub process which aims to look at the potential fraudulent customer and search for historical information or customer data points already gathered by the system. Investigation is, as of today, a human activity performed once the system is reporting a risky customer. The investigation is to complete gathering information on the customer. Reporting Money Laundering to authority after the investigation is completed and positive.

From this process we will evaluate how to deploy event processing engine and rule engine for the pattern detection, analysis and investigation, in some next posts.

EDA and Rule Engine

noreply@blogger.com (JBoy) — Fri, 01 May 2009 17:08:00 +0000

I presented sometime ago an architecture overview and use case for deploying a Rule Engine inside an Event Driven Architecture. There are papers from analysts and other bloggers on that subject which are predicting that EDA is becoming a hot subject in the next few months. I want to share what I found interesting.
Event Driven Architecture is an asynchronous publish-and-subscribe communication pattern: Publisher applications send events to a mediation layer which is notifying the subscribers interested by the events. The publisher is completely unaware of the subscriber. Components are loosely coupled in the sense that they only share the semantic of the message. The simplest Java implementation is based on using JMS Topics as it is a natural API for pub-subscribe messaging.
The data carried on the message payload are events with business means. The goal to embrace EDA is to deliver real-time access to business data. This is not really an extension of SOA but a complement of it as publishers may call services on event detection. But it can be seen orthogonal to SOA, as SOA is using a traditional procedural pattern around synchronous controlled orchestration of services.
Some are saying SOA is dead, replaced by EDA. Well SOA is still a valid approach to design IT architecture. SOA is not dead, and EDA is a complement of it. One thing that I think make EDA very attractive is the flexibility to add new function/application without impacting existing ones.
By the way EDA is not new: One of the mainframe programming models was to have batch application waiting for the result of other batches to process their own work. It is very close to subscribers waiting for events coming from publishers. At least we can say EDA is the distributed version of the old mainframe programming approach.

As soon as current application in the IT are able to post events, you have the flexibility to add/ remove listeners to address a new business needs.

So why rule engine is a critical component within EDA? One deployment is to use a BRE to support the implementation of such listener. Instead of developing rigid application you use BRE to bring the agility inside the flexibility. The component can be seen as a decision agent. The second interest is in the implementation of the event processing that has to detect event, process it and take action.

We can see multiple levels to support this event processing depending of the characteristics of the architecture and the type of event processing we look at. I'm seeing at least three:
- Simple event processing: the subscriber focuses on processing a few types of event with specific static conditions, and initiating action such as creating a new event, or calling a service. This processing can be real time or not. We may not want to consider any time dimension in the event.
- Event stream processing: Events are ordered and arrived as a stream to the subscribers. The processing may involve time windows, count based window, leveraging time based pattern,... It is used to synthesize data in real time.
- Complex Event Processing: Detect complex patterns of events, consisting of events that are widely distributed in time and location of occurrence. It supports low latency, high throughput, complex event management with aggregation, join, stateful operators, event A followed by B and by C, and all the combinations of it.
The technologies to support each processing are different, and it is important to do not use one for the other, or we will generate frustration.

Sustainable IT architecture

noreply@blogger.com (JBoy) — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 16:24:00 +0000

In current difficult economic period where companies are merging, need to comply to new regulations, reduce cost, and be able to react more quickly to economic changes, building Agile and sustainable IT architecture is a must.
So the book "Sustainable IT architecture" examines the use of Service Oriented Architectures (SOA) from the perspective of its contribution to the development of sustainable and agile IT systems that are able to adapt to new technology developments and to manage business processes.
The book is the translation and adaptation of a first french book which has a huge success in the IT community in France, and other countries using french language. I contributed for one chapter of the book around BRMS and how this component is a major piece of the Agility Chain Management System. This book also arrived on a good timing, where some architects and journalists are questioning SOA, or claiming SOA is dying. There is no doubt about SOA, its values, and approch. SMABTP, an insurance company in France, deployed SOA starting 2002 and without it they will not have their current sane business. (Jean Michel Detavernier, co-autor of the book, did an excellent presentation at DIALOG09 on how he did deploy SOA within SMABTP). You should be able to order it soon, and do not forget to comment on this blog.

ABRD v1.2 available on EPF download

noreply@blogger.com (JBoy) — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 23:53:00 +0000

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 ...

BPMN Modeling and reference guide

noreply@blogger.com (JBoy) — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 04:02:00 +0000

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.

DIALOG 09- A Success

noreply@blogger.com (JBoy) — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 00:55:00 +0000

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 who are questioning SOA value proposition, they may need to read such presentation. In such difficult economy, agile IT architecture is a Must. no question.

Manufacturing Equipment System and CEP

noreply@blogger.com (JBoy) — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 00:23:00 +0000

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 with correlation, filter out and removing consequential alarms rules to avoid generating too much actions.

When {
alarm1: Alarm(category == TrackBlocked);
alarm2:Alarm(category == ScannerEmpty; equipmentId == alarm1.equipmentID; this != alarm1)
} then {
Retract alarm2;
}

For equipment monitoring, the manager wants to monitor limits of product to tool. Once thresholds are reached we can trigger a maintenance request on tool, and reroute parts scheduled to the tool. Events are sent at each job completion. Job means the processing of a manufactured part on a tool. At each event the rule engine updates counters, and verifies thresholds. If thresholds are met

The architecture has to integrate corba, and Java RMI.

The CEP server code is simple and uses JRules POJO rule session to insert events in working memory. The performance is to process 1 event per second, and manage a sliding window of one hour. (configurable). So the code is managing a sorted list of events and removes older events no more part of the time window. This is very simple and good enough for this simple event and time window management, as high volume and performance goals are far from what low latency CEP engines are used to process.

What is interesting on this project was the classification of the application as event based processing, and so entering into the CEP space, even if we are not really working on stream of events, or using any SQL like language or computing aggregation. This is a classical alarm filtering and correlation application where an inference engine can do a good job.

SOA slowing down

noreply@blogger.com (JBoy) — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 22:32:00 +0000

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 deal of confusion about how to construct a business case for SOA
Lack of skill and no plan to acquire necessary skill
Use of modern programming environments is closely associated with SOA
Legacy skill + SOA are scared

In my recent work on the book "Resilient Information System" as co-author, I have to study what are the pains and use cases our BRMS customers have in term of SOA. I'm still doing interviews on that matter but basically there are four main subjects to address when migrating to SOA :

Data: work on the definition of domain data model, or put in place some transformation layer to present the different view of the data to the applications
Business rule: be able to understand, to externalize and to easily change the business rule outside of the applications.
Expose functions as business services: once reusable points have be identified, the services can be designed and documented (WSDL) for reuse.
Re-engineer the business processes to support automation using reusable services.

The successful deployments among our customers are done in that order. If CIO buys upfront the full SOA suite, he will most likely not get the bang for the money, as the migration to an Extended SOA is long. So the business case has to be built by increment with the first goal of deploying tools that empower the business user to change his business policies. When you are successful on this matter, the other business cases are easier to articulate, because business users are seeing the value. As explained in the Agility Chain Management System the core technologies to support the implementation are MDM, BRMS and BPM. Deploying SOA without BRMS and MDM does bring to the red path of the SOA maturity matrix. BPM, as BPEL orchestration engine, is not the solution to buy upfront, it will arrive later in the SOA maturity when we have reusable services that we can orchestrate.

SOA is a viable architecture design and approach as was OOD in programming, so please do not kill it. Now it has to be decided as a corporate initiative and implemented by increment, project after project.