The innovation of Model Driven Architecture (MDA) did not take away the need for Enterprise Architecture (EA), which itself didn't banish Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), which didn't obviate Business Process Management (BPM). Regardless of whether you take a technical point of view or a business point of view on managing the business processes that implement a business capability offered to customers or suppliers, the heady mix of buzzwords makes it difficult to figure out where to start and how to think about running your business. There is a natural inclination to leave the architecture to the technical people, but their job is automation -- and not all business processes can be automated. Every real organization has many decision processes that are nonlinear and based on insufficient information, and require the human touch.
That doesn't mean that processes cannot be optimized, whether they are automated or not. OMG's Business Ecology Initiative is founded on the notion that the key need to is recognize, precisely define, capture, store, find and optimize business processes. Automation is one form of optimization; over the last fifty years, many other techniques have arisen as well, especially from the manufacturing sector (ideas like Six Sigma, Total Quality and so forth).
Dr. Soley will give an overview of the Business Ecology Initiative, both from a technical standards perspective and based on the experiences learned in OMG's Communities of Practice in BPM, SOA, Green Computing, Cyber Security and Event Processing, and set the scene for the future integration of business and technology in the enterprise.

Two important types of models in a Model Driven Architecture relate to the processes performed as well as the services consumed and provided by organizations. The modeling of process and services are generally separate efforts even though they share many common concepts. The OMG provides BPMN for modeling processes and SoaML for modeling services. BPMN and SoaML are complimentary and together they address the organization, information and behaviors from different perspectives. There is work within the OMG to integrate these two standards. This presentation will provide brief summaries of BPMN and SoaML modeling capabilities and will show how the services defined using SoaML can be used in BPMN processes, and how BPMN processes can be used to help identify needed service capabilities.

Although TOGAF™ is an Open Group standard, it is the members rather than the staff who are the subject matter experts. Faced with a number of realities about its aging IT systems combined with limited resources to hire an experienced Enterprise Architect, The Open Group staff set about learning and using TOGAF™ for themselves. In the process they made extensive use of UML and BPMN and developed an Operating Model based on the book, Enterprise Architecture as Strategy.
This presentation will go through the process from initiation to implementation and share the lessons learned, both good and bad and review the achievements made and the challenges that we faced.

"Agile" and "MDA" (Model-Driven Architecture) do not often appear in the same sentence. Amongst several important ideas, agility promotes the notion that testing a running system is better than building descriptions of them. On the face of it, this speaks against the construction of models, surely the heart of model-driven architecture. With the addition of the Action Semantics to UML, however, models can be executed, and many of the principles of agility can be applied to executable models in the context of MDA.
This synthesis has the capability to change fundamentally how we build software. More than a mere higher-still-level language, MDA also provides the ability to change the rules whereby software is produced. In turn, this changes the roles that software developers assume. Some are better at eliciting requirements, others are able to abstract well, others are experts at understanding and using implementation platforms of different types.

Today's global environment requires businesses to work smarter and to improve the coordination between planning and execution to continuously improve business processes and optimize costs. While Business Process Management (BPM) and Enterprise Architecture (EA) each have value on their own, they are also naturally synergistic, and together provide better business outcomes and strategic alignment of business and IT.
When done together in an SOA context, BPM provides the business understanding, metrics and execution environment, and EA provides the discipline for translating business vision and strategy into architectural change. Both are needed for sustainable continuous optimization.

The need for the IT to be fast enough to supply Business demand, is a false problem and can even probably be dangerous, leading to disastrous solutions often creating more and more inertia to IT itself that will be less and less capable of keeping pace with the Business. In addition an IT innovation will boost the business even more leaving IT in the dust. The approach to be fulfill is to make the Business "ride" the IT and create a virtuous circle.
The speech will describe the risks in insisting in Business-IT alignment and investigate how to leverage MDA as a way to successfully have the Business to "ride" IT.

Benefits of automating back office processes include reduced processing cycle times, improved visibility into the status of requests for front office and customers, standardization of processes across regions, and improved quality of service to customers.

Ing. Paolo Miola achieved the double degree in Software Engineering at “Politecnico di Torino” in 1999 and at “Facultad de Informática de Barcelona (FIB-UPC)”. From 1999 to 2004 Paolo has worked as senior consultant for several ICT multinational company before in Spain until 2002 and later in Italy with a company of the Franco Bernabè group. Paolo join in TIBCO Software Inc. in April 2004 as Senior Solution Consultant working for the Italian team. He is specialized in developing innovative business solutions based on the next generation technology architecture (BPM, SOA, CEP), intended to increment business performances of clients, permitting the interoperability of applications, helping fasting the activities of the company. Paolo, through the SOA backbone infrastructure, is focused on leveraging and extending the capabilities of the existing IT infrastructure to help companies move toward predictive business: an exciting new way of doing business that lets companies anticipate customer needs, create opportunities and avoid potential problems. Paolo is one of the major Italian expert of the real-time integration, that leveraging the movement of data across the enterprise, is capable of correlating information about a company's operations and performance with information about expected behaviour and business rules so they can anticipate and respond to threats and opportunities before they occur. As Solution Consultants Paolo is able to “talk” both, business and technical languages, to converts customers business needs in technical solutions based on middleware products. Paolo ha a Certification in TIBCO SOA methodology and in PRINCES2 methodology.

The talk presents a recent survey on the adoption of Business Process Modeling tools and languages in Northern Italy. The survey involved a sample of more than 200 SMEs in the Lombardy region and was coordinated by the Università degli Studi di Milano and Athirat S.r.l., with the technical collaboration of Soluta.net. The survey results confirm the international trend of business modeling being progressively taken over by departments in charge of individual business processes, marginalizing the involvement of IT departments and personnel. In this framework, modeling a business process is often seen as a prerogative of the organizational unit overseeing it, and obstacles to a wider adoption of advanced business process modeling techniques mainly come from lack of consensus among the process stakeholders.

Ernesto Damiani is currently a Professor at the Università degli Studi di Milano and the director of the Università degli Studi di Milano’s Ph.D. program in computer science. He has held visiting positions at a number of international institutions, including George Mason University in Virginia, LaTrobe University in Melbourne, Australia, University of Technology in Sydney, Australia and the Institut National des Sciences Appliquées (INSA) at Lyon, France. Prof. Damiani leads the SESAR lab of the Università degli Studi di Milano, whose researchers have been involved in several projects funded by the EC under FP5 (FASTER), FP6 (PRIME) and FP7 (Aristotele, ASSERT4SOA, SecureSCM, PrimeLife). His areas of interest include business process representation, Web services security, processing of semi and unstructured information (e.g., XML), models and platforms supporting open source development, and semantics-aware content engineering for multimedia. He is an Associate Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Service Oriented Computing, Area Editor of the Journal of System Architecture and a member of various editorial boards. He has published several books and about 200 papers and international patents. Prof. Damiani is a Senior Member of the IEEE and ACM Distinguished Scientist, and he received the Chester Hall Award for the best paper published in the IEEE Transaction on Consumer Electronics.