Joe McKendrick, ebizQ's SOA in Action Blogger, is a nationally published author and consultant
with deep knowledge and insights regarding trends and developments in
the technology industry. He is a contributing editor to a number of
national and international publications and Websites including
Database Trends & Applications, ZDNet, and Webservices.Org. He also
serves as analyst for Evans Data Corp., and is lead analyst for Evans'
Web services and enterprise development management issues surveys.
SOA in Action Blog
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« Using SOA to Enrich the Customer Experience | Main | Before You Reuse, Get Your Ducks in a Row » March 15, 2007BPM and SOA Need to Mix It Up More "Those with BPM skills are not typically part of the SOA discussion, and as such their knowledge and connection to the business has not transferred to the organization's separate efforts. What sort of business process knowledge can SOA folks learn from their BPM counterparts, and why are we needlessly separating our BPM and SOA efforts?" That's the issue raised in a new advisory from ZapThink, which observes that business process management efforts have been successful at aligning closely to the business, something in which SOA is lacking. But the chasm is still too wide between the two disciplines. "The fact that many in IT are unable to justify a business case for a SOA investment signals that there must be a disconnect between the problems the business wants to solve and the promise of SOA as a solution," ZapThink said. "Yet, this is not the case with all IT initiatives. Indeed, the area of Business Process Management (some would add Modeling and Monitoring to the collective BPM term), has little role within the organization unless it is maps to specific business processes." ZapThink notes, however, that there is a wide gulf between the BPM and SOA communities. "Many in IT who now champion SOA are not conversant in the language of business process. They often lack skills to do proper business process modeling and have not been involved enough in the organization?s BPM efforts to learn the benefits and pitfalls of various BPM approaches. The problem is that traditional integration experts are not the same as the business process experts." Well-established BPM methodologies need to be brought into the SOA realm, ZapThink says. "Proper process-driven SOA considers BPM to be the top-down portion of any iterative SOA methodology with the result of well-defined Service contracts and a methodology that enables continuous, iterative definition of both the processes and their representative services." BPM experts should also be included in SOA teams. Posted by joemckendrick in SOA | Digg This | Add to del.icio.us Trackback Pings TrackBack URL for this entry:
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