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"BPM is about driving improvements in business performance, yet benefits from SOA thinking," writes Derek Miers in a recent report from BPM Focus (formerly Enix).
"On the other hand, SOA aspires to underpin business agility, yet it is fundamentally an approach to IT integration," he notes. "Both BPM and SOA can be thought of as a state of mind - a way of thinking about how the business and IT assets work together; how the business and governance model should be designed and a way of delivering the technology and applications to support that design. However, they are two different states of mind."
And Miers points out that "combining BPM and SOA forces two worlds to collide, each of with has a very different perspective. In the BPM world, the key role is that of the business analyst. But in IT-driven SOA initiatives, it is the Software Developer who has the driving role."
The report outlines several general and specific best practices, including: |
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"When it comes to developing effective process architectures, focus on building families of process components (services) that can be instantiated and re-used as needed. Develop a series of coarse-grained integration services such as Retrieve Customer Profile, Update Address, Calculate Credit Score or Update Inventory." |
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"Pilot the SOA architecture and BPM approach, rather than piloting the services in the pilot. Keep in mind that the intention is to develop the overall architectural framework for the enterprise." |
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"Understand that the architecture of SOA is only partly responsible for the potential benefits, which more directly derive from service design. Granularity is extremely important as it is possible to kill any project through bad service design, (and) a successful service is one that is re-used often and changes seldom." |
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The BPM Focus report references several other recent surveys, including work from McKinsey, AMR, and Forrester. It makes a distinction between the author's views of BPM as fundamentally a top-down approach and SOA as fundamentally a bottom-up approach.
The BPM Focus report makes several other overarching points with respect to BPM and SOA, including: |
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"To succeed in BPM (and to leverage the benefits of SOA more widely), requires an effective partnership between the business and IT as they together explore how the business is organized, right up to, and including, questioning the established political power bases of the firm. This involves developing an effective governance model with both the business and IT collaborating to ensure a proper foundation." |
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"Common to both (BPM and SOA) is the concept of loose coupling. With BPM tools, this is reflected through loose coupling between processes. In SOA, loose coupling enables both internal and external applications to be spread across a distributed technology infrastructure. They both encourage reuse as a mechanism to increase business agility and flexibility." |
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"Depending on the history and organizational maturity, the best start point is usually to create a high-level, cross-functional Steering Group. This group will oversee the creation of a BPM-SOA framework and the individual projects undertaken within it." |
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"Part of the problem one runs into in the BPM-SOA discussion is one of terminology, dialect and applying the traditional mindset that created the mess in the first place. Process, Component, and Service (for example) are widely used terms that are usually interpreted subtly differently by different groups." |
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"It is only by seeing and experiencing the benefits of BPM-SOA that the organization will get behind the program and help drive the change. Moreover, as a result of seeing and experiencing iterative change, the business requirements themselves start changing more rapidly." |
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| BPM Now Journal readers may download the entire report. |
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