synopsis

The combination of Business Process Management (BPM) and Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) has been the subject of a great many magazine column inches and conversations in the past couple of years. Despite so many magazine features having been written, though, there still seems to be a lack of clarity in industry about what the true relationship between the concepts of BPM and SOA is, and as a consequence, whether the relationship is worth pursuing in practical implementations. Most commonly, the relationship is seen primarily as one of technical complements - where BPM is seen as a way to make it easier to create composite applications from services, and SOA is seen as a way to make it easier to integrate automated processes with existing applications, systems and data sources. However this is only one small part of the picture, and it forces both BPM and SOA into playing purely technical, application development related roles. The truth is that there's much more benefit that can be reaped from combining BPM and SOA - but only if you are prepared to consider the processes and services can play in the context of Business Architecture work.