"IT architects in the SOA world still have no idea what BPM is, and they still don’t know what they don’t know. Process owners on the business side don’t really know what SOA is, although they’ve heard it’s good. They just want to improve business performance, however it gets done." - Bruce Silver
There's been a lot of talk in recent months about the impending conversion -- or lack thereof, depending on one's point of view -- between business process management and SOA.
In a new interview, Rob Levy, executive vice president and CTO of BEA Systems, said the convergence between SOA and business process management (BPM) is inevitable. He put it this way in an interview with Rich Seeley of SearchWebServices: "I believe in the next generation of SOA applications two things are going to control everything: BPM and metadata. You know what the metadata means and you have ways to control your business process management. You now have the way to make business applications happen."
Levy added: "If you think about it, in the future an application would not be an application the way we see it today. It will be the usage of business process and policy rules against the container of available services."
Bruce Silver, who has been watching and commenting on the BPM space for some time now, published an analysis of BEA's SOA-BPM strategy last month. He quotes BEA's Alfred Chuang, who observed that while "BPM can be effectively deployed without SOA, there is a strong synergistic benefit in combining BPM’s set of coordinated activities with the architectural benefits of SOA." SOA provides an enterprise reach to any BPM effort, he adds: "As more departments come online, more managers have a hand in controlling the IT environment. And as the system’s growth necessitates more changes, the BPM solution will soon be suffering the coordination, integration, and management problems SOA was invented to solve."
True and one of the kinds of metadata you need to manage to make BPM/SOA effective is rules/policies. Thinking of these as decision services makes managing and reusing them much easier.