<<The end game is the same: Business agility, flexibility to respond
to change, reusability to cut costs and increase efficiency and closer
alignment between IT and business.
The drivers of business process management (BPM) and service-oriented
architecture (SOA) are quite different, though: BPM is a
business-driven initiative whereas SOA is an IT-driven initiative.
And while one is an architecture and the other consists of tools and
rules used to automate business processes, of late BPM and SOA are
being used in the same breath. The reason? SOA is giving BPM new life
and helping it to deliver on the promise of agility. At the same time,
BPM is putting a business face on SOA and helping to bring the
business and IT sides of the house closer together.
According to Gary So, vice president in the office of the CTO at
webMethods, Inc. there are two different camps talking about BPM and
SOA. "Some talk about BPM and SOA being diametrically opposed and
competing for the attention of the enterprise," he said. "Others, like
WebMethods, think of BPM and SOA as a new six-letter acronym. It's
really two sides of the same coin. We see SOA as a catalyst for
accelerating a BPM initiative."
Industry analyst Bruce Silver of Bruce Silver Associates said, "There
are some uninformed people who say [BPM and SOA] are at cross
purposes. It's more that they're orthogonal. SOA is a vague concept
right now, but as it gets firmed up BPM will use it more and more. In
that sense BPM requires SOA for at least its agility promise."
However, application like BPM will always be dependent on the
underlying architecture, said Maureen Fleming, a program director for
the business process automation service at International Data Corp.
"There will always been a need to integrate applications and automate
business processes. The tools will follow whatever architecture is
prevailing in the market. SOA is the favored architecture. That means
all companies that do application deployment things need to support
this architecture."
But, she stressed, there is nothing inherent to BPM that requires SOA.
"A business process may or may not be composed of services—you can do
business process automation without SOA," she said "At same time,
where it makes sense, you better believe companies are looking at
doing things in a service-oriented way."
New lease on life for BPM
The concept behind BPM is to help organizations automate and optimize
their business processes and performance. BPM products provide process
modeling tools and key performance indicators to monitor and measure
against operational targets. BPM encompasses both system and human
workflows and BPM as a product market has been around since the 1990s.
"BPM as an enabling technology for rapidly deploying process-centric
applications predates any concept of SOA in so far as BPM leverages
whatever existing assets are in the business," said Rob Risany
director of product marketing at Savvion Inc. "Whether you're exposing
[that asset] via a Web services layer or a traditional messaging layer
for doing integration, BPM sits on top and acts as a superset to the
business community about what's available to the business."
While BPM is not new, "it's getting new life from SOA," said
WebMethods' So. Providing a framework to manage the coordination and
streamlining of manual activities, as well as automation of system to
system activities "is where the rubber has failed to meet the road in
the past with BPM," said So. "It's easy to make a nice picture of how
you'd like an organization to operate around a business process and
define metrics to measure that process, but where things have fallen
down is how to make that happen in reality."
Aside from significant organizational and people issues, BPM requires
getting the underlying systems to work together. "SOA is providing the
foundational capabilities to make some of more hollow promises of BPM
in the past more feasible" So said.
At the same time, BPM is making SOA more palatable to the business
community. "What we hear as a frustration in the business community is
that SOA has too much focus on architecture and not enough on business
services. This increases the separation between business and IT," said
Savvion's Risany. "Business people are sick of having business
initiatives sacrificed on the altar of architecture."
BPM, Risany said, converges the needs of business and IT, and when SOA
embraces that convergence and allows the business to be more agile, it
resonates. "Our big customers see the tight relationship between their
SOA approaches in terms of way they use components and the role BPM
provides in allowing business to define the way processes work and the
way to orchestrate the underlying components."
Software's newest tag team
According to Stephanie Wilkinson, manager of WebSphere product
marketing for IBM, "BPM is one of the main entry points for the
business side of SOA. SOA is about building reusable services. BPM is
focused on business processes and management and how you do modeling
and monitoring. You want to do all that on top of an SOA so you have a
flexible architecture. They will be tightly linked."
One obvious link is the process model, said Anne Thomas Manes vice
president and research director for the Burton Group.
"If you are doing SOA you should be taking a business process modeling
perspective," she said. "Your design starting point should be what
business processes do we want to execute?"
According to Ron Schmelzer, a senior analyst at ZapThink LLC, over
time BPM and SOA will become more complementary. "BPM in general is
the idea that we can model a business in terms of its processes and
then represent them in a way that computers can understand and
process. SOA has as its fundamental core the idea that business
processes should be represented as services and then exposed as
services so that different applications can consume and compose them
in a loosely coupled manner," he said. "This means that as companies
move to adopt SOA, they will necessarily implement BPM solutions as
service-oriented versions, representing processes as services and BPM
tools simply as service-oriented composition applications."
However, Schmelzer said, "That doesn't mean that BPM tools will
disappear, but necessarily they will become service composition and
composite application monitoring tools that assume that rather than
outputting code or simply models for developers to use, they will
output service-oriented metadata that is directly consumed by
service-oriented composite applications."
For more information
Ultimately, BPM is about empowering business users to make changes
based on business requirements, said Shane Pearson, vice president of
marketing and product management for BEA Systems Inc. "BPM complements
and is part of a broader SOA strategy," he said. "As we've gotten new
technologies and standards, you start to see BPM products that allow
business users to do more and more. This very much goes hand-in-hand
with SOA, which exposes services or applications with the concept that
they can be changed quickly. Business rules and BPM take advantage of
that technology."
This makes SOA more interesting to the business side, Pearson said.
"They can see how the applications they use every day are better
because of the IT investment."
BPM and SOA infrastructure vendors are looking more interesting to
each other, too. The next installment of this series will examine how
they are reaching into each other's markets.>>
You can find this at:
<http://searchwebservices.techtarget.com/originalContent/0,289142,sid26_gci1193780,00.html>
Gervas
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