Aligning IT and Business Goals with Business Process Visibility

IT must move towards managing service-oriented architectures (SOAs) from a business perspective, which means that IT managers must find the tools necessary to align its goals with those of the business. Progress® Actional® for Continuous Service Optimization (CSO) gives IT managers the power to view business processes and transactions – and the infrastructure that supports them. Read this white paper and understand how Business Process Visibility (BPV) enables organizations to author, govern and enforce policy at the process level.

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White Paper Abstract: Aligning IT and Business Goals with Business Process Visibility

In the wake of the dot-com bubble, as corporate information-technology department budgets have been slashed, perhaps no topic has been more hotly debated than the need for aligning IT and business goals.

Advancing to fill the void in recent years, in terms of tools and capabilities, are Web services and service-oriented architectures (SOAs).

It's About Business Process – Not "Boxes"

Over the past couple of years, service-oriented architectures (SOAs) have been used in an increasing number of mission-critical enterprise-wide deployments across a growing number of industry segments. As this movement into the mainstream — and away from the days of early adopters — continues within SOA-enabled organizations, line-of-business managers are interacting with IT departments and resources in entirely new ways.

IT and Business Need to Work Together More Effectively

More to the point, there is a growing need — an unmet need — for business and IT to collaborate more effectively, especially for business owners to be able to understand the underlying processes and technologies that deliver value to the business. Establishing and maintaining Sarbanes Oxley compliance is a perfect example of a real-world driver. The problem is, existing tools have never been centered on managing or understand the process, but are, in fact, infrastructure-centric.

Legacy Management Tools — Focused on "Boxes and Layers" — Don't Meet Business Need

If you look at what SOA vendors in the marketplace are producing currently, it is clear that they are still focused on what they've always been focused on: layers and platforms and services and tooling. Traditional management tools are still concerned with stacks and silos and what's going on with hard drives and application servers.

Business Process: "Need-to-Know" Information

The elephant in the room is that businesspeople don't care and don't want to know about "boxes" and "software" and "silos." Line-of-business managers, operational executives and marketing teams think in terms of the business services and processes that generate revenue, and what is happening to these processes.

For instance, when a product manager for a widget vendor sees her sales cut in half in one day, she doesn't necessarily think "this must be an IT problem" – a nebulous glitch that the guys down in database administration can fix. No: she wants answers to a number of questions:

  • Has traffic fallen off or is it the same as usual?
  • Are buyers dropping out somewhere in the check out process?
  • Have orders been placed but not been processed correctly?
  • Can we map the entire process—from site visit or phone-in order to merchandise delivery—in order to pinpoint the exact nature of the problem?

Business-Process Support: History

Since IT hasn't been organized around the end-to-end business process, there is no easy to way to use the tools at hand to deliver answers to any of these questions. In fact, IT departments have struggled with making decisions about process performance, SLA's (service-level agreements), security and capacity planning because they have lacked visibility and actionable data on what exactly is going on in the system from a business point of view. History has confirmed that application or infrastructure monitoring does not provide good correlation to the actual business being performed by the system.

The alternative has been to cobble together ways of getting visibility into and understanding what's happening with the business process, and then applying point policies to it. Of course, manually tying together information on IT functions and process responsibilities across several departments and groups — order fulfillment, inventory, customer service, and so forth — is no easy task. In fact, within most organizations, the capability to get information on and control over critical business processes just isn't there.

Automated Business Process Visibility and Optimization

With the introduction of Actional for Continuous Service Optimization, organizations now have complete business process visibility: across the infrastructure, by specific business criteria, and by individual process.

Organizations can now employ breakthrough technology to:

  • Automatically discover each and every business process
  • Reveal the IT infrastructure that supports it, then
  • Draw a process and Web services flow map
  • Optimize SOA operations automatically or manually to ensure quality of services

Enacting Policy: Taking Action with Actional Automated SOA Governance Software

With this knowledge in hand, end users can then simply label the auto-discovered process (e.g., order fulfillment) and begin applying rules and policies to it, thereby pushing appropriate instructions to the right infrastructure, at the right time and for the right conditions.

By making it possible to define and understand all the components, events and systems within a process, organizations can now define what is supposed to happen as well as what is not supposed to happen. You can know immediately when a process goes wrong — or even when a critical event doesn't happen. In this way, your ability to manage and govern, ensure compliance and monitor service-level agreements (SLAs), is greatly enhanced.

In summary, Actional for Continuous Service Optimization enables anyone in the organization to view and manage an SOA from the business and IT view simultaneously. Read on to discover the secrets of aligning IT and business goals in your organization. This tutorial contains the following sections:

For More Information

Learn more about how to align IT and business goals: download the webinar, Next Generation SOA Management: Introducing Business Process Visibility for SOA