This is Derek Miers view available at http://soa.sys-con.com/read/358234.htm
"BPM is about driving improvements in business performance, yet benefits from SOA thinking," writes Derek Miers in a recent report from BPM Focus (formerly Enix). "On the other hand, SOA aspires to underpin business agility, yet it is fundamentally an approach to IT integration," he notes. "Both BPM and SOA can be thought of as a state of mind - a way of thinking about how the business and IT assets work together; how the business and governance model should be designed and a way of delivering the technology and applications to support that design. However, they are two different states of mind." Also relevant - from Bruce SIlver Available at http://www.brsilver.com/wordpress/2006/06/05/the-phony-war-between-bpm-and-soa/ Agility is important, and SOA is all about agility, but agility is really IT's concern and not the central focus of business executives, nor is dealing with change the key objective of BPM. Better aligning processes with business goals; making processes faster, more efficient, and more reliably compliant with policies and best practices; making business performance more visible even when the process crosses organizational or system boundaries, and more actionable in real time… these are just as important as agility to business. regards, Shashank D. Jha On 5/7/07, Steve Ross-Talbot <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
I remember back in the late 1970's when I was studying Computational Science we looked at something called Operational Research. It was a topic in it's own right and it focussed on looking at how systems (people and machines) work together to achieve some goal. It looked at things like queueing theory to examine efficiency. BPM is not dissimilar. In is perhaps the same thing caste in a more modern idiom in which we understand better the nature of interaction. Interaction being the key between systems and people. Oddly enough it is what WS- CDL is based around (interaction) - but that is not the point I wish to make. The debate on SOA and BPM I think is reaching a level of maturity with various people pointing out that SOA in not really relevant to BPM. BPM sits above, as it should do, and deals with interaction and social factors in trying to make a business more efficient. SOA is way of doing things that is just a maturation of what we did in the CORBA days and even the Ada days when design by contract or using interfaces was very much to the fore. I would love to hear from some BPM practitioners (e.g. Derek Miers) and Business Rules practitioners (e.g. Said Tabet) on there take on all of this and the relevance of SOA in the work that they do relative to their respective fields of excellence. Perhaps it would give us all a better way to articulate the relationships between BPM, BusRules and SOA as well as Business Process Re-engineering. Cheers Steve T
