We on the ebizQ blogging team talk a lot about convergence between SOA and business process management. SOA enables rapid, model-driven approaches to BPM. As SOA increasingly supports BPM initiatives, it in turn evolves SOA from being "just another IT project" that may or may not be of use to a group of end-users to one that truly involves the entire enterprise and delivers value in a real way.
For the latest insights and analysis on BPM, I urge you to visit the sites of fellow ebizQ bloggers David Ogren, Sandy Kemsley,and James Taylor, who all frequently have quite a bit to say about the growing synergies between BPM and SOA methodologies.
Sandy, in fact, just wrote a piece in the Savvion newsletter on the BPM-SOA convergence, noting that "a year ago, many CIOs couldn't even spell SOA, much less understand what it could do for them." Now, only 12 months later, she observes, "Service-Oriented Architecture and BPM are seen as two ends of the spectrum of integration technologies that many organizations are using as an essential backbone for business agility."
BPM solutions are adopting the SOA way, Sandy observes. BPM systems are consuming SOA-based services, and adding human interaction to create a complete business process. In addition, the past year has seen ongoing industry consolidation, "particularly with vendors seeking to bring SOA and BPM together in their product portfolios," Sandy adds. Helping to drive BPM capabilities into the SOA space (and visa versa) is the growing acceptance of Business Process Execution Language (BPEL), a service orchestration language now widely accepted as an interchange format, if not a full execution standard.
Analysts are all hot on this growing convergence as well. In last month's SOA in Action virtual conference, Forrester analyst Ken Vollmer talked about BPM-SOA convergence in his keynote, noting that the time is ripe to begin pursuing combined BPM-SOA approaches to increase the flexibility of business processes. Vollmer observed that "SOA provides a more standards-based approach of doing BPM," and that without the foundational standards of SOA (SOAP, WSDL, UDDI, BPEL), "model-driven development in the BPM tools would not be possible." In other words, BPM would be a slow, expensive manual slog.
Gartner analysts have also weighed in on the trend, predicting that, beginning in 2007, BPM will become the driver for SOA implementations. (Reported here in SearchWebServices.) The technology for the convergence of BPM and SOA may not fully mature until 2010, but the analysts urge the adoption of a "process architecture" to make this convergence work. Gartner analyst Jim Sinur defined a "process architecture" as one that would start with the 10-15 most important business processes and drill down from there to avoid process sub-optimization."
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