Expert Core: Semantics

My  first two postings in this Core discussed the need for better semantics and the importance of business processes. My last posting discussed virtualization. It's time now to discuss the connection between business processes and virtualization.

For commercial enterprises, the ultimate objective of virtualization is to support business models. Since the core components of well-formed business models are business processes, it's time to introduce business models as a framework for business processes and virtualization. We'll proceed from virtualization to models, and then to business processes and business models.

Virtualization - Virtualization replaces physical views of computing resources with logical views, which improves agility and efficiency. Agility lowers the resource cost of changing behavior while efficiency lowers the resource cost of executing behavior. Behavior includes applications, objects, components, services, business processes and business rules. Virtualization essentially builds an abstraction layer to make resources more agile and/or more efficient, which might make them easier to use (e.g. discover and invoke), easier to change (e.g., change a service definition) and/or less costly (e.g., server consolidation) through the removal of implementation details. Implementation details include spatial and temporal coordinates, bandwidth, physical packaging, interface definitions and languages. Server consolidation based on server virtualization, for example, removes implementation details by breaking hard relationships between applications and physical servers in specific locations running specific operating systems.

Models - A model is a physical or symbolic representation of the essential structural and/or behavioral properties of a system or event. Modeling events requires representing state changes of interest associated with specific points in space and time. Events can be internal or external to the system(s) of interest. Events themselves can be virtualized but that's a topic for a future posting.

Business processes - A business process is a set of related, well-defined tasks designed to produce a product or service for one or more customers. Two critical properties of business processes:

Customer-centric—Processes are customer centric since they start (i.e. requirements) and end (i.e. deliverables) with customers, which could be external or internal to the enterprise.

Cross-functional—Since processes cut across department boundaries, they serve to coordinate and align the activities in different departments with what produces value for customers, which is the objective of a process.  Processes support business models, which produce value for the enterprise as a whole.

All types of resources can be virtualized, so it follows that business processes can be virtualized. Virtual processes break hard connections between business processes and the physical resources that support these processes.

Virtual processes are important because processes (physical or virtual) cut across organizational units. The tight coupling that comes with non-virtual processes threatens process integrity, reliability and availability when changes occur to ownership, management services or resource availability. Virtualization allows different resources to be substituted when changes occur to resource ownership, management services and/or resource availability.

Virtual processes enable virtual enterprises, which is a key design goal required for improved value chain integration and to enable strategic sourcing. Virtual processes are one abstraction level above virtual services, both of which can be implemented using the service enablement, service mediation and service orchestration capabilities of an Enterprise Service Bus (ESB).

ESB capabilities include the virtualization of the location and identity of resources. This illustrates how widely used IT products like ESBs can be used to implement advanced capabilities, including virtual enterprises based on virtual processes implemented with virtual services.

Business models - A business model is a specialization for models.  Business models describe the values of an enterprise and how these values are created, managed (preserved) and delivered to the owners of the business. Owners could be stockholders for commercial enterprises, directors for charities, or citizens for representative governments.

Profits are the common objective of commercial business models, which typically include various profit proxies such as revenue, market share, return on assets or Economic Value Added (EVA). Objectives for non-commercial enterprises might include winning a war (militaries) or feeding children (charities).

Increasingly, IT systems will be designed and implemented at higher abstraction levels more capable of directly supporting business models. Eventually, IT systems will be delivered as virtual business models that offer extreme flexibility.  Emerging programing models and standards directly support such efforts—a topic for future postings.