Business Transformation in Action

One of the challenges in bringing business process management together with service-oriented architecture is that the two essentially exist in two separate worlds, managed and promoted by different teams with different agendas. However, the two need each other more than ever in order to succeed.

In a new post, Nick Malik describes the fast-evolving relationship brewing between BPM and SOA.

"These two activities are twin brothers," he says. "Their parents are the same, and they have many similarities, but the serve different needs in the enterprise." Nick takes the analogy (a good one) a step further to describe the their common "father" as data, and their common "mother' as the business event.

Who's your Daddy? Nick describes the fatherly role as the common data model, one of the few pieces really needed to "make enterprise architecture work." In addition, he adds, "the common data model should contain ONLY enough information to define the things that must be present to define a business document, to identify the unique key for that document, and to define the relationships with other business documents."

The motherly role, then, is the business event, or "an event that defines the boundaries between business processes." He adds that "you have to know where a process starts and where it ends. Otherwise, you could find yourself comparing a single apple to a grove of apple trees."

Of course, data and business events processing need to be mature themselves before they're ready to raise children. This is not a top-down design, but it is a top-down constraint. "If you build your SOA before you understand the data, you are creating multiple versions of the truth," Nick points out. "If you attempt BPM before you identify your events, you will burn huge efforts to compare apples to apple trees, producing no value."