Business-Driven SOA – Reference Models and Standards
December 9, 2009
Active knowledge modeling (AKM) is a business-centric approach to dynamically reconfigurable service oriented architectures (SOA). Services are made available to users in the situation they find themselves, as captured by enterprise models, in a business level language. The role of a knowledge architecture is to bring purpose and context to the services, and to dynamically compose and configure business solutions from basic services in a manner far more flexible than a conventional BPMS.
We here explore the relationships between AKM and SOA, through SOA reference models, reference architectures, maturity models, and standards. Several frameworks have been developed in order to capture and explain just exactly what service oriented architectures are. This post gives an overview of different frameworks, their purpose and perspectives:
- Reference models developed to explain and create agreement about the meaning of key terms, and the dependencies between them,
- Reference architectures, template solutions for a domain, outlining typical components and subsystems, aspects and layers of services,
- Development and maturity models that describe different generations of SOA, or the path from a conventional application architecture towards a fully service oriented realization.
- Modeling architectures, presenting overviews of modeling methods, which models should be developed and how they fit together, and how the modeling languages are structured.
Web services (WS) standards are also plentiful. People have mapped them before, but the dependencies between different standards are seldom visualized. We present a WS standards map that captures major dependencies.
Enterprise Modeling – What we have learned and what we have not
November 9, 2009
I was recently invited to the second Practice of Enterprise Modeling (PoEM) conference, in Stockholm, 18-19 November. This post introduces the topics that I will talk about there. The objective is to communicate some of our lessons from 15-20 years of enterprise modeling and enterprise architecture development, to highlight advances made, important ideas that were largely forgotten, and to point out directions for future practice development. Some of the lessons presented below are obvious to enterprise modeling practitioners. They are included here because outsiders coming into the field sometimes get them wrong. Other lessons may be more controversial, and they may not be applicable in every situation.
The proceedings of the conference are available from Springer Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing. The presentation is available here (pptx). Read the rest of this entry »
Designing Roles and Smart Organizations
October 26, 2009
Roles is a key concept in social and organizational studies and is a hot topic in these application areas; Enterprise Role Management (ERM), Role Engineering Assessment (REA), Role Life-cycle Management (RLM), Social Networking for Business, Business Process Management (BPM), Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), and Holistic Design of Active Knowledge Architectures. The definition of identity, authentication, authorization, accessibility, and traceability are security needs driving this growing interest.
In most IT applications authorization is isolated from the tasks, the enabling methods and data. Roles and role-specific workplaces with tasks and views, are not supported. Coherence, coordination and collaboration are poorly supported. Workplaces are programmed and can not be designed in context-rich workspaces. Roles operate in workspaces created by work-centric and situated knowledge.
In this post we therefore look at the benefits of designing roles in context-rich workspaces. How structured roles and work-centric knowledge form the basis for a new form of smart organization. A smart organization of service-teams must be able to design and engineer roles and workspaces as projects evolve to capture practical rules and methods. Agile project teams with clear responsibilities and rules for providing services to each other should be designed as part of project design. Read the rest of this entry »
Realizing Enterprise Knowledge Management
September 16, 2009
Knowledge Management (KM) ranked high on corporate manager agendas in the early 1990s, but KM rapidly became a confusing term that managers scorned. KM systems never delivered what IT providers promised. However, some advanced information management methods were invented, and enterprise portals were developed.
Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 technologies are providing new means for social networking and sharing of personal and public knowledge. However, the core situated and work-centric enterprise knowledge can not yet be expressed, shared and managed by these technologies.
Managing work-centric and situated enterprise knowledge demands fundamental rethinking of not only the nature of enterprise knowledge, but also the practical approach to realizing knowledge management. Knowledge workers must be equipped with services to manage personal as well as role-specific knowledge. Practitioners must be empowered to react to operational events, and become responsible for their own actions, data, workspaces and work plans. Personal competence and skill profiles must match the roles the person is authorized to perform.
This post looks at how knowledge management can be implemented across projects, stages, systems and disciplines, and lifecycles, using active knowledge architectures to update and configure workspaces of work-centric and situated knowledge. Read the rest of this entry »
The Nature of Enterprise Knowledge
August 26, 2009
In the 1990s most leading companies were very much concerned about knowledge management, recognizing that knowledge and competence are the driving forces of business, design and innovation. Industrial managers were also concerned about brain drain, loss of practical competence when skilled workers with multiple job experiences retired or left to join competitors.
This post is an attempt to revitalize industrial interest in KM by introducing new concepts and discoveries, such as knowledge architectures and families, and by giving good answers to industry questions like:
- What is enterprise knowledge?
- What inherent properties does enterprise knowledge exhibit, and what capabilities does it provide?
- How is enterprise knowledge best expressed, shared and managed by industrial users?
- How is work-centric knowledge best encoded to meet industrial needs?
The questions are answered based on scientific discoveries and experiences from industrial pilots. Read the rest of this entry »
Frank Lillehagen
Håvard Jørgensen
Active Knowledge Modeling 