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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« Can We, Should We, Negotiate Our Way into SOA? | Main | Enterprise Architects vs. SOA Architects: What's the Difference? » June 14, 2007SOA and BPM -- So Happy Together At Wednesday's BI in Action virtual conference, I will be joining the Beth Gold-Bernstein, along with the folks from Business Objects and Savvion, in a panel discussion on the relationship between Business Intelligence, Business Process Management, and SOA. (Link and registration here.) What is the relationship between SOA and BPM? Sure, the two need each other, but how much? Is it a mutually dependent relationship, or a casual friendship, or somewhere in between? Recently, Tibco's Emily Burns brought some clarity to this uncertain relationship, observing that SOA and BPM are more like to two sides of the same coin. One needs the other, she explained, because "a coin with only one face is of no value, because it is no longer legal tender. BPM without SOA or vice versa, while not useless, is certainly of less value to the business. BPM and SOA can reciprocally leverage the assets of each other. By unifying them, the incremental value is not the arithmetic increase of 1+1, rather it is an exponential increase in the services and processes made available to each." She observes that bringing SOA together with BPM "unparalleled visibility into all the workings of a business process-from design through deployment to production. This approach results in greater and more effective engagement of every person involved in managing business processes, from business analysts, to IT, to system administrators." Perhaps the biggest advantage to building BPM on SOA is in the amount of manual labor needed to make BPM a reality. Traditional BPM efforts have always required extensive application development to integrate everything and make it all work. Thus, businesses would not only assume the costs of BPM software, but also of the associated development that goes with it. SOA, which involves the deployment of reusable services that can be assembled to form new "composite" services and applications, cuts out a lot of development time. I recall how Forrester's Ken Vollmer described BPM without SOA as akin to "juggling with oine hand tied behind your back." As he put it: "Business process management could be implemented without SOA, because both capabilities have been available for some time. But implementations of BPM without the SOA foundation take longer. There's more ongoing maintenance and support costs are higher, and therefore ROI is delayed. An analogy of doing BPM without an SOA foundation would be like a juggler with one hand tied behind his back. He can still do some juggling, but not as effectively and not as fast as it could be." Posted by joemckendrick in SOA | Digg This | Add to del.icio.us Trackback Pings TrackBack URL for this entry:
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