BPM Meets SOA: A New Era in Business Design

Abstract

Business Process Management (BPM) provides the design and optimization of repeatable business processes. Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) provides for the design of an enterprise using sharable services as business capability building blocks. BPM can both define the processes within service implementations and orchestrate the use of shared services to define the operation of the enterprise. Shared services as business capabilities can be engaged for multiple lines of business and achieve both economies of scale, through consolidation or outsourcing, and enterprise agility, through the ability to configure new business systems using existing capabilities. This provides the foundation for the next generation of enterprise architecture.

In the next generation, all business activity is organized as a network of collaborations where participants (people, machines or and organizations) perform activities to apply business capabilities. Formal collaborations can be specified as conventional business processes. Informal collaborations are enhanced with adaptive processes defined by case management models. Organization units perform collaborations to deliver services. Each line of business is driven by the delivery of value expressed as value propositions, and the sources of values are traced back to the service units, their collaborations and the activities within collaborations. Value delivery modeling supports optimization of this complex network of collaborations, capabilities and value contributions. The result is business design, transformation and optimization from an enterprise perspective, and agility through the ability to quickly adapt or configure the use of capabilities for process improvement, new technology or changing business demands.