SOA Principles of Service Design Review

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(More customer reviews)Where do I start?
On the positive side. It is the only computer book I have read in years that is completely free of typing and grammatical errors.
On the negative:
Thomas Erls' previous book contains lots of valuable information about services. This book does not.
A good design book would have contained more.
Every time he starts to discuss something of depth, it is always beyond the scope of the book, contained in the companion Design Patterns book or in a book that he has yet to write, or he references another chapter containing a paragraph of clarification. The OOAD section is great, but that's not the topic of the book.
You know those articles where the text is great, but the diagrams confusing and innane. Well in this book, the diagrams are inane and so is their description. Take for example, page 327. There is a drawing of a stationary car and a moving car. The text reads "State refers to the general condition of something. A car that is moving is in a state of motion, whereas a car that is not moving is in a stationary state." What enlightenment. Another figure, Figure 8.10 ( I know it well ), is repeated 4 times on two pages, and at various other places, with only changes to the text. I can't help but feeling, that if I read all of the following books that this one promotes, I may get one book's worth of content.
I know that my review differs from the others. I have extensive experience in design ( although not SOA design ), and found most of what was discussed repetetive and obvious. Also I can't help but notice when I look at other reviewers' profiles, they have only ever reviewed one book, or at most two.
I will probably buy, or at least checkout the SOA patterns book ( referenced extensively in this one as published, but lost in book desert ). I hope it contains the content that this book should have contained.


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Dynamic SOA and BPM: Best Practices for Business Process Management and SOA Agility Review

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(More customer reviews)Although the author obviously has plenty of experience and knowledge, it isn't relayed to the reader. Through paragraph after paragraph, I feel bludgeoned with words that don't seems to say much. Things that can be said very simply are obscured by the puffed-up language. The first chapter seems to assume that you're already doing extensive BPM in your enterprise.
In all, I can't make it through all the words to find the nuggets - and I'm an enterprise architect for a large organization.
BTW, the diagrams will be barely readable on a Kindle.

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Achieve Breakthrough Business Flexibility and Agility by Integrating SOA and BPMThousands of enterprises have adopted Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) based on its promise to help them respond more rapidly to changing business requirements by composing new solutions from existing business services. To deliver on this promise, however, companies need to integrate solid but flexible Business Process Management (BPM) plans into their SOA initiatives. Dynamic SOA and BPM offers a pragmatic, efficient approach for doing so. Top IBM® SOA architect Marc Fiammante takes you step-by-step through combining BPM and SOA, and using them together to build a more flexible, dynamic enterprise. Throughout the book, he emphasizes hands-on solutions based on his experience supporting dozens of enterprise SOA implementations. Practical from start to finish, Dynamic SOA and BPM squarely addresses two of the most critical challenges today's IT executives, architects, and analysts face: implementing BPM as effectively as possible and deriving more value from their SOA investments.Coverage IncludesMoving from simplified integration to dynamic processes: realizing the full business value of services

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Process Mining: Discovery, Conformance and Enhancement of Business Processes Review

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(More customer reviews)This book is a must-read for everyone who is interested in Process Mining. It covers the fundamentals and basics of this emerging discipline, and it gives a comprehensive overview of the state of the art in the field.
The book is written by Wil van der Aalst, who has started Process Mining research at the Technical University in Eindhoven about twelve years ago, and who has since been in the center of the developments around this new technology.
Be aware that this book is not a practical handbook that explains how to do Process Mining on a step-by-step basis. Instead, it provides a comprehensive overview about the field of Process Mining as a whole. Although the book does not shy away from technical details, it is easy to read. It provides a very good introduction but also highlights the challenges and complexity of Process Mining when dealing with real-life processes. If you prefer to skip the formal definitions you can still get a good overview because there are many concrete examples.

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The first to cover this missing link between data mining and process modeling, this book provides real-world techniques for monitoring and analyzing processes in real time. It is a powerful new tool destined to play a key role in business process management.

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The Decision Model: A Business Logic Framework Linking Business and Technology (IT Management) Review

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(More customer reviews)This book is a very interesting read. It is about a new type of modeling called the decision model. The decision model has the potential to add great value to the software development process. It is intended to bridge the gap between the business users and the technical team on any given project.
This book does an excellent job of explaining the decision model by putting it into its proper context. The book also does a great job of showing how the decision model would integrate with common industry standard UML diagrams used today.
The authors show how the decision model can be integrated with the traditional business process model using BPMN (Business Process Modeling Notation), use case models, the TOGAF process, and the Zachman Framework.
The major downside to the book is that tooling has not been developed to support the decision model. I did contact the authors and ask what tools they were using. They gave me the same list of the few listed in the book. IBM has a plug-in and New Wisdom has something in the works. Not having any tools available to make decision models will hurt the potential this book has for making a big impact on the current industry standards for gathering requirements.
I have been trying to make a UML Profile in SPARX EA, but just can't get the time to complete it. It will be a rather complete and should probably be created as a plug-in instead.
If tooling, that is cheap tooling, becomes available I think the Decision Model has great potential, until that happens it is great theory, but that will be all it is. SPARX EA and Visio templates will be a must for it to reach the masses that I deal with.
Because the book does such a great job of explaining the decision model I have a hard time dinging it because of the lack of tools. It is very thorough and a very good read. The theory is sound and has a ton of potential. I highly recommend reading this book for the theory itself, and if modeling tools become available you will be a step ahead in the industry.

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Business Process Management: Concepts, Languages, Architectures Review

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(More customer reviews)This is a fairly formal presentation of the subject; even though, it is quite easy to follow and does not "dry up". A possible reason for this is the author's use of many straight forward and elementary examples that he creates to paint his rhetoric.
It is evident the he is not only an expert at writing about business process management, but also in spanning the theory of it, and encapsulating that in this concise work. It is also evident that much collaboration was performed with Wil van der Aalst, and others in that group, and so Aalst's book "Workflow Management" co-written by Kees van Hee, fits nicely inside this one. Which is not to say that it is needed, the work stands alone as a definitive source -- perhaps a classic, when those general business folk become a bit more foundational minded.


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Model-Driven Architecture in Practice: A Software Production Environment Based on Conceptual Modeling Review

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(More customer reviews)This book was packed with information. The authors call their approach the OO-Method and the first part of 50 pages puts the OO-Method into its historical perspective and in true scholarly fashion gives credit to others where credit is due. If you have been around for a few years you can probably lightly gaze over this section.
The second part of almost 200 pages is called "Conceptual Modelling: About the Problem Space" and documents what you capture to build an object model, dynamic model, functional model and presentation model. It also covered both green-field and legacy systems modeling which I found enlightening.
It seems to be very complete and somehow has the feel of an undergraduate course rather than a book for experienced professionals. While the descriptions are good, I found many of the worked examples trivial and verbose.
The visual style is also a little dense with almost no diagrams in the book, no colour, no fancy fonts (except for the examples which are in italic and thus easily skipped).
The third section of almost 100 pages called "Conceptual Model Compilation: from the Problem Space to the Solution Space" is an interesting discussion on how you delivery a working piece of software once you have captured the problem using the OO-Method and includes mention of their own commercial OLIVANOVA tool as well as a comparison to OMG's MDA approach.
My first read of this book was cover to cover and in general had me nodding rather than scowling. I have been back in with the highlighter to lift the gems and I'm sure I will be reading various chapter again to refresh my memory for upcoming projects.
Thanks guys for an excellent book. Not a casual read but definitely worth the effort.


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This book introduces all the relevant information required to understand and put Model Driven Architecture (MDA) into industrial practice. It clearly explains which conceptual primitives should be present in a system specification, how to use UML to properly represent this subset of basic conceptual constructs, how to identify just those diagrams and modeling constructs that are actually required to create a meaningful conceptual schema, and how to accomplish the transformation process between the problem space and the solution space. The approach is fully supported by commercially available tools.

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ARIS: Business Process Modeling Review

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(More customer reviews)The concept of Professor Scheer to analyse and structure the business processes in order to derive the IT structure of a company is unmatched in the industry. No other Software tool I have seen so far provides a general concept and the means to wholisticly map an organisation into an IS concept. This is really best of bread and for all IS Managers and Business Planning People a must.

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This book describes in detail how ARIS methods model and identify business processes by means of the UML (Unified Modeling Language), leading to an information model that serves as the basis for a systematic and intelligent development of application systems. Multiple real-world examples using SAP R/3 illustrate aspects of business process modeling including methods of knowledge management, implementation of workflow systems and standard software solutions, and the deployment of ARIS methods.

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