I delivered my presentation today at SOA World — Service Oriented Patterns and Anti-patterns. The talk covered business interaction models, technology patterns and anti-patterns, and human patterns and anti-patterns. We were stuck in Sutton Suite, which is on the second floor and rather off the beaten path. I thought that the location might deter attendance, but to my surprise, the session was packed. Every seat was taken, the back of the room was full, and the audience spilled over into the hallway. The session seemed to be well received and we had some discussion around the topics as well. I hope that more work is done around the subject of patterns for service orientation. I definitely think that the OASIS Reference Model is a good start. I may take an opportunity to post my thoughts on that another time.

For those of you that were able to find the room and attend the talk, thank you so much for providing me with an opportunity to speak with you. I enjoyed it and I hope that you got something out of the session.

If you would like to browse through my presentation from this afternoon, you can download it here: Service Oriented Patterns and Anti-patterns (PDF)

Top-down business process development and service orchestration is gaining increasing attention among the clients that we are working with. Their appetite for a more strategic end-to-end solution composed of underlying services is reaching a critical mass. Some are turning to formal process management strategies ala BPM. Others are taking a less formal, but still equally valid approach of simply managing process and service models and treating business processes and service orchestrations that execute within the context of a service bus or process engine.

One common characteristic that I have observed is the need for process champions. Each process needs an owner that can fight for it, protect it, and ensure that it remains relevant and value-added. Some organizations are tasking business analysts and business engineers with process ownership. Others are moving this responsibility further up to a senior manager or director. Some very progressive organizations are even defining a new breed of architect — The Process Architect. I had the pleasure of talking with someone from Ford Motor Company earlier this week and I was pleased to discover that they embrace this progressive perspective within their enterprise.

About a month ago, ZapThink interviewed me regarding the changing role of the business analyst within the service oriented enterprise. I took the opportunity to expand on some of these ideas in more depth. If you are interested, you can get the podcast from their site here: The Service Oriented Business Analyst