SOA MAKES BPM AGILE

SOA MAKES BPM AGILE


BPM traditionally has been separate from composite applications and the concept of service orchestration because it has traditionally been a modeling or design-time application. But runtime process modeling and management necessarily means management of composite services, which means that process-driven SOA tools will necessarily support composite applications that are either an orchestration or choreography of services.

The integration technology must loosely couple the applications and resources that make up the process, otherwise the logic of a process will get hard-coded into a particular technology platform, which may be expensive to change and therefore defeat the entire purpose of BPM. This is where standards-based service oriented architecture (SOA) comes in. An SOA provides the technical ability to create that process independence. SOA standards, such as Web Services, make information resources and task automation applications available yet loosely integrated for process designers to use and reuse at will. Thus processes modeled with BPM tools can be rapidly implemented in production via SOA infrastructure.

Together BPM and SOA facilitate the next phase of business process evolution from merely “automated” to “managed flexibility.” Thus business automation will no longer be about hard-coding a function to be repeated infinitely. Automation will be about creating services reusable in many different ways in multiple processes that can be continuously improved. This helps allow enterprises to achieve dramatic improvements in market capture, cost effectiveness and profitability.