Business blueprinting-cracking the IT code?

Business blueprinting. It sounds like mapping the DNA of business, and that's what Unisys is attempting to do with its new, so-named initiative. Like gene therapy, the idea is that by mapping and understanding the organism-in this case, technology that enables business processes to deliver value-you can find the root causes of diseases and target cures. For IT organizations, the disease is complexity and cost. The cure, according to Unisys, is a model-driven regimen that exposes the connections between business strategy, technology and key business processes.

In theory, business blueprinting would allow you to changes a business process, such as an order management system, within hours or minutes instead of days or weeks. In principle, business blueprinting is chasing one of computing's holy grails-abstracting the business processes from the tangle of the underlying applications and infrastructure.

Unisys' business blueprinting isn't another faux cure in the endless stream of technology palliatives, however. Nor is it revolutionary. Other companies-including IBM, HP, and SAP with armies of consultants--are seeking cures, emboldened by Web services protocols such as BPEL4WS (Business Process Execution Language for Web Services) and demand for more business agility. Unisys' approach is primarily a methodology and architecture that leverages emerging standards, industry-specific knowledge, and best practices focused around aligning business process with IT.

Basically, business blueprinting creates models linking business processes to the underlying technology support infrastructure. The blueprints allow users to model costs and preview the impact of changes on the IT infrastructure and the business.

"Most of business processing modeling has been more static and manual," said Fred Dillman, vice president of technology abd architecture, Unisys enterprise transformation services. "If a business process changes, you have to do it over again. Every one of business blueprint models is rendered as XML and then links to business services, application functions and technical infrastructure that supports it. As business processes change, you can quickly model those changes and understand the impact in terms of cost and time."

The financial services company ING Group, an early beta site for Unisys' blueprinting service, had 17 unique instances of the same business process across various divisions. It turned out that 70 percent of the functions within those business processes were the same across different applications. Eliminating the redundant code and creating reusable components significantly reduced development and integration costs, as well as the cost of training users on duplicative systems.

Unisys's blueprints are based on mapping four layers, synchronizing processes, technologies, tools and infrastructure. The first layer maps the business goals, organizational measures and competitive framework to corresponding business processes. The second layer looks for patterns among the business processes, and ties into the underlying applications and infrastructure support, to identify redundancies. The third layer models the underlying applications that support the business processes within a Web-based, service-oriented architecture, The fourth layer connects the infrastructure model to the other layers to ensure alignment with the business objectives.

"The result [of the methodology] is a tangible, reusable, highly adaptable digital record of intellectual assets," Dillman said. "Business blueprinting gets to the idea of mass customization. We want to get businesses to think in a way that allows them to get custom business processes using common componentry in the business and IT infrastructure. The technology is commoditized at the lower level, and we can do much more complex things at the more abstracted, higher level."

Mass customization is a compelling concept, but difficult to pull off, especially in the often dysfunctional and complex IT world. That said, as Unisys iterates a set of specific business processes, the accumulated knowledge, along with industry cooperation, could yield some standard components and blueprints. The company can also take advantage of the more componentized software that enterprise application vendors are already building on service-oriented architectures.

Unisys plans to offer blueprint solutions across several industries, including financial services, transportation, telecommunications, media, retail and government. In the retail industry, for example, Unisys is developing Safe Commerce, a solution for secure, in-bound supply chain operations to protect against acts of terrorism and contamination.

On the development platform front, Unisys is taking a neutral stance in the Java versus .Net battle. The company has endorsed both IBM (J2EE) and Microsoft (.Net) development platforms.

I hear from vendors about aligning technology more effectively with business processes, but it's often marketing speak in pursuit of revenue. Unisys business blueprinting appears to be far more than a nice whiteboard drawing that looks like a four-layer cake.

John Madden, a senior analyst at Summit Strategies familiar with Unisys' business blueprinting concept, believes it is a unique methodology as well as a way for Unisys to put a bigger stake in the ground as a services company. "Unisys isn't trying to boil the ocean with this initiative. It's building on top of their intellectual capital and things they have already been doing like integration, outsourcing and applying industry expertise to specific areas," Madden said.

If the least that Unisys can do is to convince IT organizations to focus on business processes, service-oriented architectures, and modular, composite applications, that's a good step toward an eventual cure.

Is the concept of business blueprinting a path to IT enlightenment? Are IT organizations really ready to take inefficiencies out of their development efforts? Use TalkBack to let your fellow ZDNet readers know what you think. Or write to me at dan.farber@cnet.com. If you're looking for my commentaries on other IT topics, check the archives.