change) quickly, perceives the need for change in the future, and accepts that need as a
cost of doing business.
The next step is the hard one and in fact the reason for the book you are holding (and
the nexus of the TLAs on the cover). The hard part of IT integration isn’t the technology
per se; the reason we can see further is that we stand on the shoulders of giants. The
complex chemistry and optics used to create our integrated circuits are far below our
level of detail; we can depend on others to solve those problems. No, the hard part
of IT has always been, and remains today, the enormous gap between management of
operations and technology that supports those operations.
How can this be? After more than 50 years of computing, well over 30 years of computing
in large organizations, and some 20 years into the pervasive (personal) computing revolu-
tion, why should it still be difficult to recognize business challenges in a way that technical
solutions clearly address those challenges? The answer is simple: Like other young tech-
nology fields, from the marine architecture field a half a millennium ago to the century-
old technologies just mentioned, shared languages are just coming into use.
By“shared languages” I do not mean the languages of management (natural languages
such as English or abstract but unstructured languages such as spreadsheets and presen-
tations); nor do I mean the languages of computer technologists (such as Java, LISP,
and Cþþ). I mean languages that are readable from both sides of that divide: modeling
languages. This isn’t a new idea, of course; in marine and building architecture we use
blueprints. Blueprints speak to the buyer, the seller, the builder, even the makers of
parts and the builders that use those parts. Blueprints can be turned, relatively directly,
into three-dimensional models for the home buyer as well as parts lists for the electri-
cian. Blueprints are standardized, structured, and well accepted. What we need to do
is take that broad step in the IT industry.
Though this book starts off with three TLAs on the cover, you’ll find that the real cover-
age is both more and less. “More” in the sense that you will find more acronyms and
ideas inside, but connected together in a way that makes sense; and “less” in the sense
that all these ideas sum to one basic idea: If modeling works in other engineering fields,
it will work in the IT field. Agility in the enterprise—better, faster, cheaper—comes from
being able to structure organizations to take advantage of reusable business capabilities;
from the ability to recognize, precisely capture, store, and retrieve the definitions of
those capabilities; and from the ability to capture all that information in a shared,
widely understandable model of the enterprise.
Those are, respectively, service-oriented architecture (SOA), business process manage-
ment (BPM), and model-based management (MBM)—thus the title and contents of this
book.
Forewordxvi
bemood2013-12-11OCEB TECHNICAL INTERMEDIATE EXAM 的参考书。 学习章节Chapter 3 (Business Process Management, sections on Processes in SOA, and Choreography) 4 (Business Rules)
