DMReview

The software industry as a whole seems to be migrating toward semantics like a flock of birds heading South for the winter. Slowly, I am beginning to see the term “semantics” being used in various disciplines, such as the Semantic Web, SOA, business intelligence, information integration and business process management. In all these contexts, the term seems to be used in a consistent manner – to represent the body of words used to describe the business.

Through these semantics we hide or abstract the underlying systems and data from the business processes. This abstraction provides us the agility and flexibility that is touted as a benefit of these technologies. Are these technologies really making our organizations more agile? Or, is the agility coming from the agreement and abstraction being defined by the semantics? Ultimately, I suppose, it is irrelevant which begets which, since it is the end result we are most interested in; but it is important to realize that the goal of BPM does not deliver agility without you first defining some level of abstraction for your data and systems.

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