what the heck is that thingamy?

Inspired by a kick-in-the-butt by John to further crystallise and "put words" to what the thingamy "is".

Perhaps it'll become a mini-series - leaning heavily on what "not" it is. Here's the first one.

Lemme humbly compare with middleware / SOA / BPxx - even risking mockery for being superficial and not even "getting" those others... :)

Here are the players in the game of getting some structure to the business processes,

on Blue Team we have:

Middleware: Middleware consists of software agents acting as an intermediary between different application components. It is used most often to support complex, distributed applications. The software agents involved may be one or many.
BPEL, BPMS, BPQL, BPMN, BPxx: Software tools to implement Business Process Management that encompasses either the design or capture of existing processes. Execution of a complete business process can also be achieved by using a patchwork of interfacing software with human intervention needed where applications are not able to automatically interface. In addition there is reporting.
SOA: Service-Oriented Architecture, comprise loosely coupled, highly interoperable application services.

For reasons further described below I group these to be on the same "team".

On the Red Team we have (oops, only one there):

Thingamy: An enigmatic, unproved, bugger-me-if-I-have-any-respect for the current status run-your-business software entity.

Some core differences table:

	Blue Team	Red Team
Applications:	Use existing applications, bridging the processes back and forth as the applications still have the traits of being "workstations" enabled to do many different tasks used anywhere.	Disentangles the tasks from the current applications and puts them directly into the right place in the proper sequence (workflow / process).
Development / implementation:	Top-down, waterfall, much methodology.	No methodology, follow any natural flow of events, can start anywhere limited to anything and grow from there in both directions if and when appropriate. Play instead of plan.
Data and logic:	Holds and handles manipulated data (logic applied to raw data), removes that logic and applies other logic as the flow progresses.	Holds only raw data, applies all kind of logic to same raw data sets when needed. All raw data captures metadata like when, what and who did something to it for true history.
Systems maintenance and requirements:	Use many different applications and core systems with even multiple databases / data repositories.	One single 35 MB small executable running on any server. Add browser at client.

I'll gladly update and / or correct any misunderstandings regarding Blue Team!

Any inclination as to which ones could entail more complexity, which one is more nimble, which one being closer to reality? I will not venture an view on that until the game has started :)

Comments

[Arnie McKinnis]

Comment on the use of Red and Blue - great color choice, but to keep with the color theme - I would suggest reversing. There is a book called "Blue Ocean Strategy" that uses Red and Blue oceans to talk about making your competition irrelevant - and that's what you are doing here - Red is messy and crowed, Blue is open and free.

[sig]

Arnie, good point! Will keep that in mind (and will check out book too...)

Next step would be the "Team" issue, a team of one is not much of a team... in essence, hoping for team-members aka competitors, hmm, a philosophical-strategic question indeed :)