Directions for future research on the integration of SOA, BPM, and BRM

Digital transformation has been changing the economic environment of enterprises in recent years. To remain competitive, they rely on an extensible software architecture, flexible workflow execution, and automated decision management. The concepts of service-oriented architectures (SOA), business process management (BPM), and business rules management (BRM) provide an adequate, yet isolated means of addressing many of these requirements. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

This study adapts from established research frameworks to structure the current state of research on the integration of SOA, BPM and BRM. The authors highlight the current research scope, point to disregarded topics and sketch out multidisciplinary research approaches.

While the three concepts are often discussed only in isolation or pairwise, approaches that integrate them are scarce. Against this backdrop, this study defines three types of research opportunities and identifies several directions for future research that should be explored from a technological as well as organizational perspective. Given the breadth of open questions, the authors present sources for each area of our research framework, which can serve as starting points for future investigations.

Except for well-established support for separate tasks and technologies, there is a lack of integrated standards, methods and platforms, which for example enable integrated decision-making across BPM and SOA.

Our contribution builds on established frameworks and clearly shows that the discussion on the integration of SOA, BPM and BRM cannot yet be regarded as sufficient. The research agenda highlights which areas explicitly benefit from a more precise consideration.