Forrester's Ken Vollmer, who has been a guest here for ebizQ events, is a firm believer in SOA-business process management convergence.
He recently told SearchWebServices' Rich Seeley that enterprise architects should be adopting the latest integration-centric business process management suites (IC-BPMS) in their SOA development efforts.
(I know, IC-BPMS sounds more like a long-range missile than a software tool, but that's what they're calling them...)
Such tools can help organizations implement combined BPM and integration capabilities based on an SOA foundation, Vollmer said.
As Vollmer put it at last year's SOA in Action conference: "Business process management could be implemented without SOA, because both capabilities have been available for some time. But implementations of BPM without the SOA foundation take longer. There's more ongoing maintenance and support costs are higher, and therefore ROI is delayed. An analogy of doing BPM without an SOA foundation would be like a juggler with one hand tied behind his back. He can still do some juggling, but not as effectively and not as fast as it could be."
However, many companies are taking a wait-and-see approach regarding the use of these tools.
Vollmer said organizations implementing these tools are already seeing results. For example, one leading international provider of paper products was used to automate its cash receivable business process using BPM over SOA tools.
"The old process required manual intervention to interpret payment reconciliation transactions received from its bank prior to allocating the cash to the correct enterprise resource planning (ERP) system accounts," Vollmer said. "The new process feeds the reconciliation statements to an integration-centric business process management suite (IC-BPMS) that automatically allocates receivables directly into the correct ERP accounts by electronic interpretation of simple business rules stored in the BPM tool. This change completely eliminated manual efforts while shortening processing times by two days."
This must have come from someone talking on an elevator, between the 2nd and 3rd floors. Was the adjective "Little" referring to the information value of the article, or the process?
Sorry, I came to this URL to see what Ken had to say, hopefully about a BPM that cost less than a mini-cap's capitalization.
Jim