Business-Driven Architect

This week, I’m at the Inaugural SOA | BPM Symposium in San Antonio, Texas.  The program, put together jointly by the SOA Consortium and BPM Consortium, features invited speaker talks, case studies, panels and group discussion on using SOA and BPM, individually and together, to achieve business value.

For those following the SOA Consortium since the onset, you know we view SOA and BPM as complementary strategies.  Each delivers business value on its own.  But, used together, the business value amplifies.  Of course, in the beginning we were amongst the minority that saw SOA and BPM as complements rather than competitors.

In fact, in our first Executive Summit series in February 2007, leading CIOs and CTOs implored us to help "break the artificial divide between SOA and BPM".  From their point of view, SOA and BPM are complements:

    “SOA, BPM, Lean, Six Sigma are all basically one thing (business strategy and structure) that must work side by side”. – CTO during SOA Executive Summit

An excerpt from our Executive Summit whitepaper (pdf) expands on this statement:

“The CIO and CTO participants think about SOA from a top-down business view. That view starts with business processes, expands into business activities, associates those activities to the balance sheet, and then considers the required business services to accomplish those activities. These business services are not at the discrete technical implementation level. Rather, the business services refer to services provided by humans, or machines.

Essentially, these executives see SOA as the means to “execute the business model”. For this to transpire, the methods to define and record this executable business model, and the supporting technology must be seamless. In the minds of IT executives, SOA and BPM related products are used in concert to accomplish one goal, despite the discrete technology industry packaging.”

Now, with the artificial divide removed, it’s time to bring the communities together to share insights, warnings and value statements.  I look forward to hearing real-world stories and participating in the symposium discussion.

To extend the insights and conversations outside of the conference room, I’ll be live-blogging at SOA Consortium Insights and Business-Driven Architect (here) from Tuesday’s session, and we’ll record several of the Tuesday and Wednesday sessions to be published as podcasts.  I’m hosting on Wednesday, so no live-blogging.  And of course, there will be twittering both days.