Burton Group - Application Platform Strategies

Field Research Actions to Take: Course-Correcting Your BPM Program

Tue, 31 Aug 2010 01:00:00 GMT

In the final document of a six-part series, Analyst Richard Watson examines the implications of Gartner field research study findings on business process management (BPM). Richard Watson identifies four strategic planning activities that enterprises should follow to improve the effectiveness and sustainability of BPM initiatives. This document will help decision makers understand where to invest effectively in BPM, define a roadmap for a BPM program, and deal with the changes required to become process oriented.

Field Research Results: Gaining Business Benefit from BPM

Fri, 27 Aug 2010 01:00:00 GMT

In late 2009, Gartner conducted field research to investigate the state of business process management (BPM) initiatives. The analyst team interviewed 35 business and IT personnel representing 23 organizations. The research goal was to understand how organizations are doing BPM and whether they are succeeding or failing. In Part 5 of this six-part series, Analyst Richard Watson presents key findings based on participants’ efforts to capture measureable business value from their activities. One common challenge for BPM leaders is to clearly articulate the business value they derive from their BPM initiatives.

Resurrecting SOA

Thu, 12 Aug 2010 01:00:00 GMT

The service oriented architecture (SOA) initiatives at many organizations have been disappointing: Highly inflated expectations have fallen flat, and the promised benefits of increased agility and reduced costs are nowhere in sight. Businesspeople no longer believe the hype, and SOA budgets have been slashed; yet the need for SOA is stronger now than ever before. In this management initiative document, Vice President and Distinguished Analyst Anne Thomas Manes redefines SOA and provides advice to the weary for resurrecting their failed SOA initiatives. This document describes credible targets, requisite competency programs, and supporting cultural investments that engender success.

The State of SOA: Gartner and Burton Position Reconciliation

Mon, 09 Aug 2010 01:00:00 GMT

Service-oriented architecture facilitates development of modern applications. Some organizations have realized benefits with SOA; others have struggled. This Gartner/Burton research helps IT executives and development managers better understand SOA concepts and SOA development best practices.

Strategic Software Assessment Framework

Fri, 23 Jul 2010 01:00:00 GMT

Even critically important software—strategic software—has an end of life. The trick is to know when that end of life may come and plan appropriate actions soon enough to avoid adverse consequences. Unfortunately, strategic software tends to live longer than it should. Thus, enterprises avoid planning for software removal and replacement through either default or neglect. In this guidance document, Research Vice President Joe Bugajski presents an assessment framework for deciding the fate of strategic software before it is too late to plan a graceful and efficient transition to new software.

Cloud Application Architecture Patterns: Building Cloud Optimized Applications

Wed, 07 Jul 2010 14:00:00 GMT

Cloud computing requires an architecture shift and new development models. Traditional application and data architecture does not enable optimal elastic scalability and maximum utilization of shared infrastructure. To build Cloud-friendly applications that will maximize benefits, development teams must apply Cloud application design patterns to build systems that exhibit parallelism, multi-tenancy, autonomy, distributed interactions, declarative definitions, separation of concerns, and federation.
In this session, Burton Group Vice President Chris Haddad discusses how to build cloud optimized applications and data by:

Identifying application and data optimization candidates
Applying cloud-friendly patterns
Choosing new programming models
Including new infrastructure components

Field Research Results: Executing a BPM Program

Mon, 14 Jun 2010 01:00:00 GMT

In late 2009, Burton Group conducted field research to investigate the state of business process management (BPM) initiatives. The study is based on in-depth interviews with 35 business and IT personnel representing 23 organizations. The research goal was to understand how organizations are doing BPM and deriving value from their efforts. An important finding is that organizations execute isolated BPM projects with tactical goals more often than projects that contribute to a strategic program. In part four of this six-part series, Analyst Richard Watson discusses the study’s findings on programs, projects, and how process modeling capability underpins all BPM efforts.

Frameworks and Containers

Tue, 08 Jun 2010 01:00:00 GMT

Frameworks and containers provide pre-built capabilities that simplify enterprise application development. Frameworks and containers typically coexist. Frameworks aid development of enterprise software, whereas containers provide many runtime services. In this Burton Group template, Analyst Kirk Knoernschild explores the frameworks and containers component of the application platform.

Service Mediation

Tue, 18 May 2010 01:00:00 GMT

Service mediators support infrastructure capabilities and automatic policy enforcement in a service oriented architecture (SOA) runtime environment. Service mediators can be deployed throughout the environment using a combination of layered configurations, thus enabling robust security and reliability. This Burton Group Reference Architecture template describes the topological configuration options for service mediation.

Managed Communications Infrastructure

Tue, 18 May 2010 01:00:00 GMT

This updated Reference Architecture template presents a functional model of a runtime infrastructure. The Managed Communications Infrastructure (MCI) describes the infrastructure capabilities required to support managed communications between service endpoints in service-oriented systems. Any organization involved in initiatives that require distributed computing, such as service oriented architecture (SOA), business-to-business (B2B) integration, business process management (BPM), cloud computing, web applications, and mashups, should be working to increase the resiliency and security of their runtime infrastructure in accordance to the MCI model.