BPM is SOA's Reason for Existence

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July 02, 2007

BPM is SOA's Reason for Existence

That's a headline that certainly caught my eye when I spotted it in Application Development Trends. This is especially argumentative, in light of Steve Jones' recent pronouncement that SOA and BPM aren't necessarily a good mix, since BPM breaks down services into "steps."

Kurt Mackie over at ADT sees things differently, however. Kurt walks us through the debate over SOA value as an enable of reuse, noting that some observers say few SOA services will actually see reuse in the end.

BPM is the reason for businesses to invest in an SOA, Kurt says, and he backs it up with data, courtesy of IBM's Peter Rhys Jenkins. IBM's own survey of 765 CEOs worldwide found that top-performing companies were twice as likely to stress the need for business model innovation compared with the opinion of their counterparts in underperforming companies. Then, there's an InformationWeek survey that found that 65 percent of IT professionals plan to streamline or optimize their business processes in 2007.

So the world is hungry, starving, for effective BPM. BPM is a way to encapsulate "tribal knowledge" in a company. It's difficult to get information about how workers do their jobs because workers fear the possibility that their jobs may be outsourced. SOA provides a medium for services that can surface that tribal knowledge where and when it is needed.

I would beg to differ about the value of reuse and sharing as a benefit of SOA -- but it's clear that SOA and BPM will evolve closer together, and appear to need each other.

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

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Comments

I think that there is a need to capture integrated views on a service from business and technology perspectives. I’d love to see there standard based tools for direct mapping between semantic expressions by subject matter experts (SME) and technology artifacts. These Enterprise">http://its.javaschool.com/its.web/ekb.jsp>Enterprise Knowledge Bus would allow SMEs early entrance into collaborative work together with technologists in SOA space.

Posted by: Jeff Zhuk at July 2, 2007 10:22 PM

Business Process Discovery leads to
Business Process Analysis leads to
Business Process Improvement leads to
Business Process Management leads to
Service Orientated Architecture

It all starts with discovery and ends with SOA – BPM is just a middle step and ultimately the most valuable asset to the business is the repository of its business processes which in turn act as a best practice library and ESB hub

Posted by: Alan Crean at July 3, 2007 04:21 AM

I believe SOA and BPM are symbiotic, but not in the way Mackie suggests. Rather than being an enabler of reuse I believe BPM will be an enabler of agility. BPM tools (and skills) provide rapid service orchestration capabilities. The ability to quickly link enterprise data and functions together into innovative value chains will be a competitive advantage. SOA exposes information, BPM delivers it.

Posted by: Marc Rix at July 3, 2007 03:23 PM