The Insider's Guide to Next-Generation BPM
By Greg Carter, CTO and Executive Vice President of Product Development, Metastorm , 05/14/2009
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Service-oriented architecture (SOA) has recently received quite a bit of industry attention -- and understandably so, as a number of companies are reevaluating their IT investments to ensure that they sustain the longevity of their technology over the next five, 10 and 20 years. But can SOA assure the value of IT investments in the current economic environment?
Budgets are tight and executives face the challenge of justifying how every technology investment will deliver maximum business value. However, if most businesses thrive on providing specific services to customers, it is important that businesses invest in IT that is intended to make these services more efficient for the company and convenient for their consumers.
From a high level, executives face pressure to constantly assess and have visibility into the services that are going to add immediate value to customers, to identify how these services are going to be used by their most important business functions and to evaluate the services that are consumed by the most critical business processes in an organization.
Though this scenario may seem overwhelming, these challenges can be addressed with business process management (BPM) methodologies and software, an integral technology to effective service orientation. SOA relies on the work of BPM to define, analyze, and execute resources where SOA has the best effect. The result is aligning strategy with execution in an agile enterprise that allows business models to drive executable processes powered by a portfolio of services.
By focusing on the processes, activities, events, information, and services that are required to execute the business, SOA gives business owners a more direct and active role in the design of IT systems that enable enterprise agility.
Because SOA starts at the enterprise level, a number of companies and public sector organizations have used BPM to gain visibility into its core capabilities. This IT insight across the entire organization is then used by companies to direct SOA resources to where enterprises need them most.
El Paso County in Colorado, for example, faced a challenge to reorganize its IT infrastructure that would evolve its business into a standards-based environment. The harbinger of this initiative was to tie El Paso County's disparate systems together into one SOA that could reach the ultimate goal of providing great service and flexibility within the organization and to its 575,000 citizens. With over 2,000 employees, the county had been running its operations manually and many of its critical processes had subsequently become inefficient and unproductive. By operating their processes manually, employees could not track status and effectively manage its information.
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