It is our contention that an agile organisation is built on a foundation of dynamic business processes underpinned by flexible services. Achieving the former is the remit of the Business Process Management and Lean Manufacturing disciplines; achieving the latter being the domain of Services Based Business Design and Service Oriented Architecture. We also believe that adopting either a BPM or SOA strategy without the other will achieve incremental improvement only and certainly not deliver a truly agile organisation.
It is also a commonly held belief that neither BPM nor SOA can be delivered without an architectural approach to design and implementation. Our Integrated Architecture Framework has been designed specifically to support this and is uniquely suited to enabling a BPM/SOA strategy. Our unique approach to Business Capability Modelling underpins the actual design of an agile organisation. In doing so, we have developed an engineering based approach to address key issues that are preventing BPM and SOA from delivering their combined promise.
For example, this approach can be used to determine that correct boundary between top-down business process re-engineering and bottom-up lean manufacturing and continuous improvement for business process management initiatives. For a SOA strategy, it provides a scientific way to determine the correct granularity of services. Subsequently, the use of our Business Capability Model to solve these key issues is unique to Fragile to Agile.
This is encapsulated in the following diagram which depicts the Fragile to Agile Agility Pyramid:
