<<Why Business Process Disappears within the Cloud? ZapThink's Ronald Schmeizer has identified
two models of Cloud Computing - widely represented
infrastructure-centric model and emerging business process-oriented
model. If the first model is almost self-explanatory, the second one
requires additional information to understand. Ronald says: "...emergence
of ... process clouds that provide the same infrastructural and
economic benefits of clouds, but applied to process-specific concerns.
These cloud providers enable the outsourcing of entire processes that
run in a virtualized cloud environment as a way of handling variability
in scale." Well, here are two immediate questions: 1) If an infrastructure-centric Cloud is used to address process-specific concerns, does this 'application' constitute new model of Cloud Computing? While the first question is a subject for separate full-scale
discussion, in this post I am going to explain that why I think that
the answer to the second question is NO. But, first of all, let me
define the terms I will be talking about: • Business Process - invocation of structured functional and/or operational business actions/activities in the order defined in accordance with business logic; the invocation results in accumulative real world effect of actions/activities execution So, let's take a closer look at 'business process'. It is not difficult to find that majority of business processes in the organisations are just implementations of business tasks specific to the organisations. Of cause, many business processes exist to address industry regulations and local laws. However, the realisation of these regulations in each company is unique. Since Cloud Computing (CC) tends to be universal, how can it appear in conjunction with unique business processes? How CC virtualises the internal business processes? How Cloud providers can possibly know anything about the internal process concerns of the organisation? The answer is simple - Cloud providers do not know. Instead, providers of business process-oriented Cloud try to generalise commonly known and used business functions that are typical to different business domains and offer them as sub-processes to the internal business processes of the Cloud clients. In other words, such providers put some business knowledge on the top of to-be scalable and robust infrastructure. For example, a healthcare organisation can utilise Cloud providers for claims processing (if local law permits this) or a merchant can delegate refund processing to the Cloud providers. I hope you have noticed already that Cloud providers realise business functions, not processes, within the CC. We leave issues like security and business flexibility in the CC
aside for now and concentrate on the generalised business functions. To
implement them in fully automatic manner, we have to preserve a few
constraints: 1) interfaces to implementing functional components have to be coarse-grained (to accept a variety of organisation specific data structures) I am stressing on the 'automatic manner' because I do not expect CC to provide any manual data processing (but who knows what CC will be capable of doing tomorrow...Sometimes, a cheap labour is cheaper than automation while scalability and robustness may be not of concern for some clients). Anyway, when I observe the whole picture of listed constraints, they seem to me as requirements to... a business service outsourced into the CC. What are the differences between a business service and a business process in the Cloud? I do not see any. To make implementation of business function relatively generic (to serve as many clients as possible), Cloud providers have no other choice than create and use several lower level business service implementations, which in different combinations are capable to address a bit of business specifics for each individual client. Thus, I can say that the process-oriented Cloud model is just a collaboration of the business services accompanied by the business decision-making services and data access services managed by, probably, orchestrating service. If you see a gap in my logic, please, let me know. As a result, Cloud Computing has demonstrated to us that fully automated business processes are nothing else that service collaborations (with assumption that all automates implementation of process actions may be constructed as composite or autonomous business services). This trivial at a glance conclusion has a far going implication on IT position regarding business processes. In particular, if Cloud Computing can treat automated business process as a service collaboration, why internal IT cannot do the same thing? Imagine an organisation that has several low level business operational teams. What task IT is usually solving for Business? It supports activities of these teams. What these teams actually do from the business perspective and why they do it in particular way situate out of the scope of the tasks given to IT. In reality, in many cases the low level business operational teams work against old requirements and provide implementation of business formulated sometimes years ago. Do you think that replacement of internal IT by 'process-oriented', i.e. service-oriented, Cloud is the efficient business decision? I do not believe so: saving on IT infrastructure, Business looses flexibility in adoption to business changes, i.e. looses agility to market. Service-oriented CC may become business efficient if it may be made responsible for the whole business solutions, i.e. when it automates those low level business operational processes and replaces related teams. This is what internal IT had to do when it tried to realise "SOA initiatives" in the first place. Whether internal IT has missed the chance to survive in competition with the CC, I do not know; this depends on how well the CC will be able to possess business acumen. Nonetheless, for those ITs that still have their chance, bridging service-oriented solutions into the business operational processes and thinking out of the 'process box' is the way to go, the way to survive.>>You can read this at: http://www.ebizq.net/blogs/service_oriented/2009/06/why_business_process_disappears_within_the_cloud.php Gervas |
