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It’s often in the process, not always in the tool

Machiel Groeneveld and Mary Beijleveld  just finished a project at an educational institution. Schools often work in close cooperation with other schools and are usually part of a larger partnership with various schools in there municipality. Part of the cooperation and collaboration is regarding allocation of types of education and schools. This school for predominantly HAVO / VWO education (ca. 1500 students) and a smaller part consisting of VMBO vocational education (ca. 500) has more than 200 people working there. Personnel consists of teachers, deans, staff, facilities, and a few people minding all IT systems.

Approach was asked to advice the school on how to make best use of ICT resources for creating schedules for students and teachers and the formation of the teachers workforce.

In summary, the experienced problems were  late completion of grids/schedules and therefore late insight on how many and for which subjects to hire teachers. This also depends on prognosis  on how many new students registered, how many student proceed to next school year and school type and has great consequences on school budget . Our first view on the case was that content of programs and applications were not synchronized, information wasn’t up to date and necessary information not congruent.

In order to give a practical and good advice we first had to identify the most crucial problems regarding process, what IT resources where available, in what manner IT resources were used, and what priority solving a problem has to the school stakeholders. To find out what bothers most, takes the most time, how many and which stakeholders are involved, we held interviews with all stakeholders.

Machiel has in-depth knowledge and experience on how IT systems work and knowledge on some pretty important lean practices. Mary is expert in BPM methods &  techniques and has experience in solving organizational issues. Working together enabled us to take a multidisciplinary view at the problem and to assemble the best and most valuable advice for this customer.

In the interviews we walked, step by step, thru the whole end-to-end process to see where bottlenecks occur, where transfers to other roles were necessary (or not) and which IT resources were used to support stakeholders and process. We didn’t use a sophisticated tool, just rounded A5 papers and pencils or whiteboard and markers to make process visible.

In short, problems were caused by low assessable homemade systems (access dbase, spreadsheets), synchronization of information between homemade systems & commercial products and between Do-It-Yourself systems themselves. Furthermore, process was not ranged optimally and errors easily occurred. Limited accessibility to the content of programs and applications (for example the scheduling makers) and various officials at different times and places making changes in program content.

For quick wins Approach, amongst others,  advised on making clear decisions on moments and responsibilities within the end-to-end process, communication and governance on decisions  & appointments  and improvement on the use of (DIY) systems by supplying a ‘howto’.  For long term alleviation, Approach suggested sensitive communication to understand who needs what information in which step, where an inaccuracy cascades in multiple errors further on in process and disciplined actions for controllability and management.  And we recommend on further research on functionality, integration capabilities and interconnectedness of their existing or future IT resources.

When we presented our report, stakeholders said they didn’t expect to get such advice. They expected something like: ‘get rid of your IT resources, DIY systems and buy ‘this’ one’.  At the end of the presentation session we helped stakeholders to realize about their own responsibilities in the process and to decide about the next approach. The school leaders expressed they were very pleased.

Some tips & tricks on migrating SOA Suite 10g to 11g – Part 2

This blog contains some experiences taken from our migration from SOA Suite 10g to SOA Suite 11g. The previous one was about custom XSLT functions, sensors, composite instance tracking, and Domain Value Maps (DVM). This entry is about using Oracle Internet Directory (OID) 10g as identity provider for SOA Suite 11g.

Integrating OID 10g with SOA Suite 11g
Using OID 10g as identity- and access provider in SOA Suite 10g wasn’t entirely trivial. After applying the steps as documented in Oracle BPEL Process Manager Administrator’s Guide 10g you needed to perform some additional configuration steps that could be somewhat tricky at first. Jaap Poot has some great blogs on this.

Oracle Service Bus article on OTN

The Oracle Service Bus article Eric Elzinga and I wrote is published on Oracle Technology Network (OTN).

The article is aimed at developers and architects who are familiar with Oracle Enterprise Service Bus (OESB) and are (fairly) new to Oracle Service Bus (OSB). The tutorials in this article highlight differences between these two products. The tutorials are based on a workshop in the WAAI community; a collaboration of Dutch consultancies (Whitehorses, Approach, AMIS, and IT-Eye). The goal of the WAAI collaboration is to share, bundle, and expand knowledge on the recent Fusion Middleware 11g release.

Governing events and architect anti-patterns

As the name suggests, SOA is all about services. What about events? In the past, several SOA-efforts tended to neglect events; ultimately causing SOA not to deliver on its full potential or fail altogether. So SOA-practitioners evangelized the use of events. And of course we as IT-industry came up with new terminology to emphasize this: EDA, SOA 2.0, and event-driven SOA to name a few.

This blog is not about promoting events since its importance is (hopefully!) recognized and events are mainstream in nowadays SOA-initiatives. If not, I encourage you to read this blog that explains why events are important from both business and technical perspective. There can be no real SOA without events. Events are just as important as services!

Presentations Oracle OpenWorld 2009

Oracle OpenWorld and Oracle Develop 2009: It’s a Wrap! Just like last year an awesome event! Read about some of the highlights and experiences in this previous blog.

Lonneke Dikmans and I presented the following two sessions on Oracle OpenWorld 2009 that can be viewed here:

Best practices 4 – Security and Identity Management

This is the fourth blog in a series of BPM and SOA best-practices. The previous blog in this series was on Oracle ESB and Mediator. This blog will discuss security and identity management in an SOA-environment.

Oracle Open World 2009 highlights

Sitting in my hotel room after the keynote by Larry Ellison that had my ‘all time favorite action Hero and now governor’ Arnold Schwarzenegger as a guest, I was thinking about the highlights of this conference. One of them, obviously, was seeing ‘Arnie’ on stage.

But, on a serious note, there were several highlights as well. Let’s look at them in no particular order.

Some tips and tricks on migrating SOA Suite 10g to 11g

Just a few things I noticed last week when migrating BPEL and ESB projects from SOA Suite 10g to SCA composites and components in SOA Suite 11g.

Views on Management: Rijnland vs. Anglo-American

On invitation of Bram, who is a Master Black Belt in Lean Six Sigma, I participated in a meeting with members of a Dutch network of quality managers (Nederlands Netwerk van Kwaliteitsmanagers – NNK). The goal of this NNK network and someone that brings Lean Six Sigma into practice is, as you might have guessed: quality improvement.
As I am a Business Process Management consultant at Approach, which of course has a lot to do with (process) quality improvement, I gladly accepted this invitation. Topic of the evening was the difference between two views (Rijnlands vs. Anglo-American) on quality management. Rijnlands being a management paradigm from the Netherlands and Germany, Anglo American as a management culture from USA and UK.

Exception-handling in JAX-WS Web Services on WebLogic

There is more to exception-handling in JAX-WS Web Services than meets the eye. Especially when throwing custom (checked) exceptions from your Java methods that are exposed as Web Service operations. There’s a nice blog by Eben Hewitt on using SOAP Faults and Exceptions in Java JAX-WS Web Services. I recommend reading it; especially when you get the following error: javax.xml.ws.soap.SOAPFaultException java.lang.NoSuchMethodException. This is one of the issues you might run into when migrating from Oracle Application Server (OC4J) to Oracle WebLogic Server.