Human Services Bus Stays Human by Norbert Bieberstein

IBM thought leader opts for an enterprise organization that works like a service-oriented IT architecture

Service-oriented architectures (SOA) can act as a pattern for flexible format to organize the enterprise. However humans should not be regarded as error-prone services, but be treated as intelligent service providers and consumers in the organization.

Since introduction of SOA as predominant architecture of modern IT infrastructure there are new options to organize your enterprise. This impacts the whole enterprise – professionals of all kind as well managers. If you seriously follow the SOA idea then you offer all services in the enterprise in a flexible way, you have to set up rules and regulations to guarantee effective and efficient operations.

In order to automate business processes you can imagine business process models that are directly derived to executable programs. In this approach one speaks of human interaction. This implies humans acting as units in automated processes and controlled like programs.

The individual appears simply as an operational part that is integrated via task lists or portals. Business processes follow business needs and determine – as it seems – enterprise operations. Following this thought you see the individuals lined up along a service bus and provide services as demanded.

But the human being is not to regard in such a passive role alone. Everybody in this Human Services Bus ( HSB ) structure is entitled to demand services and contribute to the business results. There are IT means that support the collaboration, tool ranging from simple e-mail to web2.0 elements. The cooperation on the HSB means an organization form that suits best to an SOA. Each individual in the whole enterprise is seen and acting as a service provider and service consumer.

Triggers to start a work chain can be external requirements, e.g. customer demands. Within a HSB organization in a service-oriented IT infrastructure and equipped with state-of-the-art collaborative tools most administrational intermediate or mediating steps can become obsolete, if there all business rules are well-defined and implemented. These regulations and rules can be designed as SOA lifecycle model, be proven and tested, refined and changed according the needs and insight gained during execution.

In this context management is asked to take a rather monitoring, analytical and rules defining role. The type “big boss” is less required here. Most decisions within the HSB-organized enterprise are covered by rules that are known to everybody and applicable to the given situation. Support in concrete cases is assured via the HSB. Successes and costs are monitored immediately by various measurement tools e.g. in a business dash board. Failures are quickly detected and can lead to immediate changes in the model, the rules and regulations etc.

The self-regulating organization

Operation in such an organization becomes a self-regulating system where humans are not seen as programmable units. It allows – analogous to the SOA services repository – to play out the individual strengths, talents, skills, and even temperaments of the professionals. All of that can be registered for everybody else’s knowledge so that human resources can be utilized as flexibly as possible.

However, as always, not all employees are willing to fit into this new system. Some people show aversion towards innovation and wont adopt new styles of working and cooperation. Especially in some IT departments you encounter the NIH (Not Invented Here) syndrome. Finally one can build any system with the given tools and acquired skills, rather the individual genius can build software to do anything. So foreign solutions are not trusted easily, but developed by one self. Sociologists prove that such resisting people – not alone in IT departments, but you meet them generally in the enterprise – are never the majority. Many people just wait and cautiously adopt innovation. Real laggards are a very small minority.

In order to change the enterprise towards such an organization model and to get it operating as desired there is the need to find the right projects and convincing protagonists. As shown by various scientific and practical research success drags success, people follow the innovators, when they demonstrate advantages for the individual. A proven mean to help emphasize this change process is to set up incentive patterns that support reuse or individual contribution to business successes.

People do not disturb SOA based enterprises. Just the opposite is the case: the individual employee becomes the central agent of the agile enterprise, and agent that helps the organization to compete on the global market, the globalized economy. Introducing new freedom by such a flexible IT infrastructure and providing all these collaborative tools also means that many non-productive, merely administrative tasks can be reduced and more work is directly done to achieve business success, adding to the bottom line.

Norbert Bieberstein
EIS - SOA Advanced Technologies,
IBM Software Group
Strategic Technical Evangelism

This article was recently published by Computerzeitung.

Norbert Bieberstein co-authored the book Service-Oriented Architecture Compass, Business Value, Planning, and Enterprse Roadmap. This book kept #1 selling position of over 100 SOA titles at B&N for a full year.


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Gary E. Smith
SOA Project Manager