This week, I'm representing the SOA Consortium at BPM Think Tank. Why an SOA advocacy group at a BPM event? Simple. During our first Executive Summit series in February, leading CIOs and CTOs implored us to help "break the artificial divide between SOA and BPM". From their point of view, SOA and BPM are complements:
“SOA, BPM, Lean, Six Sigma are all basically one thing (business strategy and structure) that must work side by side”. – CTO during SOA Executive Summit
An excerpt from our Executive Summit whitepaper expands on this statement:
The CIO and CTO participants think about SOA from a top-down business view. That view starts with business processes, expands into business activities, associates those activities to the balance sheet, and then considers the required business services to accomplish those activities. These business services are not at the discrete technical implementation level. Rather, the business services refer to services provided by humans, or machines.
Essentially, these executives see SOA as the means to “execute the business model”. For this to transpire, the methods to define and record this executable business model, and the supporting technology must be seamless. In the minds of IT executives, SOA and BPM related products are used in concert to accomplish one goal, despite the discrete technology industry packaging.
The SOA Consortium shares this view. SOA and BPM are complementary strategies. Each delivers business value on its own. But, used together, the business value amplifies.
While I'm here, I'll be participating on a SOA and BPM panel, and I'll be engaging in conversations with BPM community leaders on how we can collaborate to "break the artificial divide between SOA and BPM".
If you are using SOA and BPM together and would like to share your insights and/or stories, feel free to leave a comment, or send me an email: brenda at soa-consortium.org
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