SOA makes us more agile, BPM makes us consistent. That's a combination explored in some depth by Gartner analyst Daryl Plummer at this year's DIALOG 08 event.
ebizQ colleague James Taylor is blogging live from DIALOG 08, and provides a thorough report on Daryl's presentation. Daryl spoke of the rise of "Dynamic BPM," which is the intersection between business process management and service-oriented architecture. As James relates, Daryl pointed out that "Dynamic BPM is becoming a requirement, not an option, as the frequency of change is increasing while the amount of change (the amplitude) is also increasing."
Companies that don't start marshaling their BPM and SOA resources in an integrated fashion risk increased costs and diminished opportunities, Daryl said: "If we don’t keep up we get lots of chaos, more expensive governance as we react, business agility becomes harder and decision making becomes increasingly 'seat of the pants.'"
The movement away from distributed systems or silos make business agility more of a possibility. As James quoted Daryl: "The growth of standards and frameworks, middleware and more has made it easier and provided a better platform. Adding event-processing, ESB and SOA meant that BPM could really deliver."
I like Daryl's ultimate definition of a service: "Something which does something for me without me having to do it or know how it was done - I ask, it does, it tells me its done."
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