There are several firms in the midst of SOA and BPM initiatives. From a design standpoint (among others), aligning them is very useful. Why? Several reasons:
- SOA initiatives without the context of one or more business processes will lack the necessary abstractions and domain relevance that is required for service capabilities
- BPM execution models will leverage your service capabilities via a mediation layer as opposed to directly invoking proprietary interfaces or tactical service providers.
- Your logical data models - domain relevant entities - will need to be appropriately leveraged by both services and BPM. Without this alignment you will end up with additional data transformations and opportunities for semantic inconsistencies within process flows
- Your domain inventory of services aren't going to build up in one project or initiative. It needs to be iteratively evolved and in conjunction with your day to day deliverables. BPM projects provide the perfect context for this objective. By identifying business services, decision services, and human workflow components, BPM will not only help you identify service capabilities but also give you the opportunity to validate existing ones.
- BPM execution models are consumers of service capabilities. By aligning these efforts, there is a feedback loop established. In the same vein, services need to be reused in multiple business processes. There are several questions that spring to mind - are service contracts free of legacy semantics? are they devoid of needless coupling? do they provide the right set of exceptions/errors? how does the service behave when stressed under high-load/unexpected volume? BPM projects that automate real business processes for your organization help you answer these questions within the context of tangible business deliverables.
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