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January 10, 2008
Adding decisions to the SOA/BPM mix

Following a link from Elizabeth I found a post by Jim Sinur titled "What is the Nature of the BPM/SOA Codependence?". Jim makes some good points about the interdependence of SOA and BPM.

Typically 80% of business activity does not include systems, integration, straight-through processing and transactions (the playground of SOA). The 20% that is highly automated is certainly the most efficient and productive; therefore, the more work an organization can push there, the better.

It is, of course, in these highly automated processes that decision management comes into play. When one is trying to automate a process for straight-through-processing, the need to automate decisions in an independent way while retaining agility to support changing requirements is critical.

While BPM does support SOA for system tasks, BPM can live well managing the human-only activities without SOA. But as more rules and processes are leveraged as reusable components, they take on a SOA flavor. In reality they really help each other and the failure of one could impact the success of the other.

While I would say "decisions" not "rules", again I think Jim is spot on. The exposure of automated decisions as decision services is not only critical to the management of the decisions themselves, it is also critical to the automation of the processes that revolved around those decisions.

Curiously enough, however, one of the most human-centric of process types - case management - also needs good decision management. The automation of what can/should be allowed next is both important in case management and reliant on decision management as I discussed here.

I was also reminded of a post I wrote on delivering agility. SOA cannot deliver agility alone because some services (like decision services) need to change internally and BPM cannot deliver it alone because all too often the process is not what needs to change so much as a decision within the process. Decision management, in conjunction with SOA and BPM, is the missing link.

Posted by jtaylor in Business Process Management • Decision Technologies • SOA |Digg This|Add to del.icio.us

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