OMG Communities of Practice

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In 2009, OMG launched the Business Ecology® Initiative (BEI). Business Ecology is a business-technology imperative focused on streamlining business processes, removing waste from technology portfolios, and adjusting resource consumption, to optimize business operations and foster business innovation. Business Ecology is not a one-time fix, but rather a management philosophy concerned with business vitality over time, balancing current conditions, external change forces, optimization and innovation focus areas, resource allocations, and longer-term business motivations, capabilities and outcomes. An important enabler of Business Ecology is the use of technology beyond automation. Business Ecology practitioners employ technology to identify, measure, model and drive business change. The BEI promotes its message through the publication of whitepapers and press releases; sponsors an annual case study awards program to promote best practices and share lessons learned; and holds and participates in industry conferences. OMG has also developed several Communities of Practice to support BEI including BPM/SOA Community of Practice™, Green CIO Community of Practice™ (GCIO™ CoP), Cyber Security Community of Practice ™ and Event Processing Community of Practice™.

OMG has a proven track record of developing communities of practice around cutting edge technology concepts. OMG’s SOA Consortium started with just four sponsors and seven participants. The organization has included more than eight sponsors, including Cisco, HP, IBM Corporation, Layer 7 Technologies, MegaPractical, NEC Sphere, SPARX Systems and Sun Microsystems, Inc. and more than 100 member organization participants. Several thousand people attended SOA Consortium meetings, listened to podcasts of SOA Consortium expert guest speakers, downloaded whitepapers and presentations, submitted SOA case studies to the SOA Consortium / CIO magazine Case Study Competition, tuned into the SOA Insights blog, and attended co-branded SOA Consortium tracks at major industry events. In 2009, the SOA Consortium declared success and will be combining with the former BPM Consortium.

The SOA Consortium will be continuing its advocacy efforts as part of the new BPM/SOA Community of Practice under the Business Ecology Initiative. In 2007, Service Oriented Architecture was a fringe methodology that only a few organizations were doing with any great success, rather than an accepted part of an overall business strategy. Three years later, corporations large and small use the principles of SOA to enhance their overall business and technology strategies. The combined use of Service Oriented Architecture and Business Process Management results in an optimized business environment that is change-friendly, and poised for business innovation. Business Process Management and Service Oriented Architecture, individually and combined, enable Business Ecology.

These Communities of Practice are comprised of practitioners, service providers and technology vendors, dedicated to promoting the business value, and enabling the successful adoption of specific, key business-technology strategies, by the Global 1000, major government agencies and mid-market businesses. They aren’t focused on standards in the technical sense, but instead are communities of people, agencies and companies driving common standardized means of education, definitions and goals for use by business and IT. Together these communities energize the market and promote involvement.

• BPM/SOA Community of Practice: is an advocacy group of end users, service providers and technology vendors committed to helping the Global 1000, major government agencies, and mid-market businesses in the successful adoption of Business Process Management (BPM) and Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) methods and technologies.
• Green CIO (GCIO) Community of Practice: the mission of GCIO is to promote the value of business-technology as a means to discover and eliminate wasteful business actions and resource consumption, resulting in smarter, sustainable processes and business optimization.
• Cyber Security Community of Practice: this group is now forming to address the real challenges of cyber security. The group’s aim is to raise awareness on Cyber Security threats, risks and protections to enable leaders, professionals and consumers to make intelligent trade-offs with respect to information sharing, business interactions, technology adoption, policymaking and threat mitigation.
• Event Processing Community of Practice: The group’s mission is to “Promote the value and adoption of Event Processing as a means for organizations to increase business agility, innovation and profitability via continuous analytics and intelligence.”

In addition to working group calls and forum discussions, these groups typically meet several times a year to exchange ideas, listen to expert presenters and network with peers. Check the OMG website for upcoming events.