Are SOA and BPM Really a Match Made in Heaven?

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June 22, 2007

Are SOA and BPM Really a Match Made in Heaven?

One point I and many other analysts in the ebizQ blogosphere proclaim with great persistence is that SOA and business process management are made for each other. (I just said as much last week, here.) A service-oriented architecture provides the systems flexibility and agility to model and design business processes as needed by the business.

However, there are voices that question the legitimacy (or at least the efficacy) of this marriage.

Loraine Lawson points to a new post by Steve Jones, who, for one, is now questioning the notion that "a service is a specific business process step that can be composed and reused in different business processes," calling it "completely and utterly wrong."

Steve is no lightweight in this market, as he is the head of SOA and SaaS for Capgemini’s global outsourcing business, member of the OASIS SOA Reference Model group, and author of a number of technology books, including Enterprise SOA Adoption Strategies.

The problem, Steve says, starts on the BPM side, with efforts that seek to address services as "steps." As a result, he says, "every service looks like a step."

What's wrong with that? Steve says that in the process, legacy function calls merely get swapped out with new protocols, but that does not a service-oriented architecture make. If you are using a BPM approach and saying "step = service," then "you are doing VISUAL Cobol and replacing function calls with service. The fact that you are using WS-* or XML does not make these elements 'services.'"

In essence, he says, "BPM-driven SOA tends to make bad SOA as it is driven from a procedural and process view, has poor separation of concerns and is mostly all about driving things from the technology perspective. SOA makes great BPM, BPM makes crappy SOA."

Strong words, indeed. And, ironically, Steve is arguing that BPM-driven SOA is too technical. That's one of the greatest arguments around SOA, is that it needs to be business-driven, and linking SOA to BPM is seen as a way to introduce business drivers to the effort.

Posted by joemckendrick in SOA | Digg This | Add to del.icio.us