Modeling Enterprise Interoperability: Taming the Information Explosion

The problems of enterprise interoperability, portability, maintenance and integration are not exactly new. From the first time code was stored in memory, the problems of legacy integration with new users and new uses of computing systems began. The explosion of computing vendors and tools hasn't exactly made the problem any easier. In fact, it's the explosion of information in general that is causing the problem. We expect information at our fingertips, but somehow we expect that to come about magically, despite different developers, different development styles, different coding languages, operating systems, instruction set architectures - and a general lack of planning (or indeed, reading of the literature). The most important problem is the enormous explosion of information available in the world, and the increasing demands for globalized, mobile, agile, connected business processes across newly digital value chains. The resulting complexity makes integration even harder than it was before - and it was near impossible before. There is some hope, however. That hope is formal modeling, with associated metrics and continuous improvement of processes based on customer and supplier feedback. That is much easier to achieve, however, when those business models are "live" - that is, rather than simply documenting the business process, they in fact are the business process. This requires not only formal models, but formal models with well-defined semantics. The combination of Business Process Modeling (BPM) with Model Driven Architecture (MDA) promises just that. This keynote will discuss the driving factors for BPM and MDA, and the standards that support the approach.