An expansion of the worlds of SOA and BPMS into the areas of “business value analysis” and “business innovation management” seems to be in the air.
Late December 2010, a Norwegian national project was granted. Funding equals 80 Million Euro’s, for an 8-year project. It is about “service innovation”, with focus on value concepts.
NEFFICS is considered a closely related project. SINTEF, coordinator of NEFFICS, is a participant, and so is Induct Software, another participant of NEFFICS. Cordys isn’t participating directly, as it isn’t a Norwegian company.
Note that “Value Delivery Modeling”, according to the OMG standard-in-progress VDM, is considered a core ingredient of the project. On the project page there is a link to the proposal text. Just search in it on “value”, “value delivery metamodel”, “NEFFICS”, etc., and observe the synergy. Clearly this project will stimulate the OMG work, and it will be an amplifier of NEFFICS results. This project seems to be an indication that a new market is emerging. How else can it be explained that a government, which is otherwise conservative in research funding, is spending 80 Million Euros on a project.
The Dutch magazine Automatiseringsgids (AG) recently started a new column on Innovation. The Dutch agency Agentschap.nl informed AG about the European project NEFFICS, and the fact that Cordys participates in it. AG then contacted us for a remote interview, the result of which is published here.
Cordys, Vlastuin and Induct Software are currently busy analyzing how to best support management of business innovation & transformation, based on and around VDM. There is a quite some “impact estimation” & “decision making”, collaboratively between stakeholders, involved in this. We recently started involving Lindsey Brodie, a researcher who is associated to the EVO community of Gilb.com, in this subject. She is expert in this area, and interested in application of EVO techniques (and adaptations of these, in particular “Value Impact Estimation”) in business innovation context. With Vlastuin we are currently constructing spreadsheet models to gain fundamental understanding of how to best apply these concepts and of how users can best work with them. From there we want to derive the actual specifications for development of a CPF-based application (the functionality of which we envisage to become part of the platform in the future), as well as the further development of the VDM modeler in Cordys BOP (CWS), and the development of integration with and extension of the Induct Software platform. It is also intended to apply Case Management to the management of business innovation and transformation.
NEFFICS proceedings are closely synchronized with ongoing standardization projects in the OMG, in particular the VDM and CMPM standards-in-progress. SINTEF is coordinating both NEFFICS and these OMG standardization projects.
