BPM and SOA: Better Together

Enterprise competitive and cost pressures are creating the need to rapidly adapt and streamline business processes to create new business value or increase operational efficiency. To that end, enterprise processes are becoming increasingly explicit and business process management (BPM) is evolving from a paper-based diagramming tool to a comprehensive solution that models, monitors, simulates, and redesigns processes for competitive improvement. The endgame of BPM is unprecedented process flexibility ? where workflows (both human and automated) can be determined in real-time by the events or outcomes within the process. This helps allow the business to act appropriately and competitively regardless of the situation.

For this endgame to happen, processes must become independent of specific information resources and specific task automation applications. The integration technology must loosely couple the applications and resources that make up the process, otherwise the logic of a process will get hard-coded into a particular technology platform, which may be expensive to change and therefore defeat the entire purpose of BPM. This is where standards-based service oriented architecture (SOA) comes in. An SOA provides the technical ability to create that process independence. SOA standards, such as Web Services, make information resources and task automation applications available yet loosely integrated for process designers to use and reuse at will. Thus processes modeled with BPM tools can be rapidly implemented in production via SOA infrastructure.

Together BPM and SOA facilitate the next phase of business process evolution from merely "automated" to "managed flexibility." Thus business automation will no longer be about hard-coding a function to be repeated infinitely. Automation will be about creating services reusable in many different ways in multiple processes that can be continuously improved. This helps allow enterprises to achieve dramatic improvements in market capture, cost effectiveness and profitability.

This paper explores the relationship between BPM and SOA in creating business agility. It outlines how solution suites such as IBM's Process Integration suite narrow the gap between sophisticated process modeling and actual enterprise implementation.

BPM is the future for enterprises

The business need for process management is clear. Streamlined, automated business processes can help deliver huge gains in organizational and cost productivity. Flexible, event-driven business processes often exploit evolving opportunities in the marketplace. Thus the holy grail for enterprises from the smallest corner business to the largest multinational is to maximize both automation and flexibility in the processes that create corporate value. This can help the enterprise be both competitively agile and cost efficient.

To that end the business world has spent the last 30 years becoming more process aware. Enterprises have learned how to document and map their processes, developed analysis techniques to identify bottlenecks and unnecessary steps, and developed process maturity models to document quality control and performance improvements. All of this activity has helped to increase executive awareness of how their business actually operates in a complex world of interdependent companies. It also helped companies understand the difference between core competencies, value-added processes and utility processes. Progress has been made to improve corporate competitiveness through improved process management. Indeed the market for business process management (BPM) tools is expected to reach $3 billion by 2009, according to IDC1.

Yet the global marketplace is not static and today's business trends demand the continued evolution of business process management. Business cycle slowdowns require companies to examine and streamline their business processes to help them save time and money. Whether it's the ability to mass produce custom computers, cars or shoes or the ability to rapidly coordinate supply-delivery logistics for an unexpected event or corporate merge, enterprises must have more flexibility in how their processes create business value. Many consider the current preponderance of niche marketing, rapid customization of product design and manufacturing through just-in-time systems to be the death-knell of "one-size-fits-all" products and services. Thus it is no surprise that today's business thinking is rife with continuous improvement, task definition based on real-time collaboration, and modeling decision making for unexpected events. Instead of creating corporate chaos, all of these business trends are really pushing enterprise processes away from traditional notions of static automation and towards flexible automation where real-time process adaptations are part of normal, daily business operations.