Barry is an IT consultant specialized in enterprise integration. In this role, he advises companies and designs solutions. He lets different business units and platforms communicate with each-other. Automating the communication between the various parts of the business allows the company to be more effective and more agile at a reduced cost of operations.
With a long history in Enterprise Application Integration (EAI), Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) and Business Process Management (BPM), he has plenty of experience and a rich palette for solution design. With a master degree in computer science, he has the technical background to go in-depth into the material.
Barry has been working for companies in many different domains, from high-tech industry, the energy sector, fashion, marketing and communication and also government, each with their specific focus and quirks.
About this blog
On this blog, I’m sharing my thoughts about the IT challenges, cases and trends that I encounter in my line of work as an integration specialist at Rubix.
Comments and opinions expressed are my own.
Do we model ad hoc process tasks in BPM?
The first step in BPM processes is often ad hoc: A customer fills in a request form, an employee reports an issue or a salesperson enters a new sale. You can’t predict when exactly they will occur, but as soon as the task is executed, the business starts working on fulfilling the job. These ad hoc process tasks are an integral part of the business process, or are they not? Different viewpoints Business and IT often tend to disagree at this point. Lets analyse what makes this situation such a problem. What does the business expect from a...
read moreForms in BPM: the correct way
You know about good BPM design, about separation of long-lived flows and short-lived interactions. You want to move your forms outside of your long-lived flows, preferably in a dedicated GUI product, but the business requires you to put the forms in the BPM flow. Either because they want one system to handle all interaction, they need the persistence in every step of the user-interaction, or maybe because they need the transaction log for legal reasons. How do you solve this dilemma? Where to put user forms in BPM User forms are a good...
read moreThe difference between case management and classic BPM
At the start of any large business automation project (after the analysis of the business domain, but before the design starts) you should always ask yourself the question: will I be using case management or classic BPM? This decision has a huge impact on the final result of your BPM project. But what is the difference between case management and classic BPM? And what will be the impact of choosing either solution? Classic BPM Business Process Management originally was a method of analyzing and optimizing the processes in a business, as...
read moreImplementing Cloud Scaling
In a previous post, I showcased an example of waste in a customer environment. The customer had two massive servers in a fail-over setup, which resulted in low utilization. The customer was paying for a system that was at best 50% utilized, so 50% of his costs were for the fail-over scenario that may happen once or twice during the lifetime of the servers. To reduce the cost, we can switch to a scalable environment. But how do you achieve a scalable environment? How do you implement cloud scaling? How to imlement cloud scaling The general...
read moreGood BPM process design
People often wonder makes a good BPM process design. Should a process include many small steps, or should it be a few large steps? Do we avoid user actions, or do we make extensive page-flows as part of our process? I find that these things are not what makes a process design good or bad. Good design is mostly about avoiding pitfalls. Here are some tips that will make your BPM processes better. Separation of business data and process state The most important step for good BPM process design is to remove all your business data. You don’t...
read moreAuto-scaling in the cloud
Lately I was visiting a customer that was moving its applications to new servers. They had acquired two huge servers to host their middleware solution, connecting their on premise applications and their cloud-hosted solutions. The client went for an active-active setup, where both servers are handling the load, but if one server fails, the remaining server must be able to handle all the trafic. It sounds like a good setup, but it introduces a lot of waste. We will go into this and show why a cloud solution using auto-scaling is so much...
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