How does SOA improve BPM

[ms1mm0]

Interested in hearing your views on how BPM with SOA is better than just BPM

[KRBPM]

BPM with SOA allows you to flexibly treat elements of business processes and the underlying IT infrastructure as standardized components (services) that can be reused and combined to address changing business priorities.

Services are the “building blocks” for business processes. Packaging business functions from applications in a simple and standardized way creates services that are available for use and re-use

BPM with SOA enhances process flexibility. Customers can:
• Analyze, Decompose and Rebuild Business Processes
• Accelerate Process Changes
• Gain broader visibility across the infrastructure
• Processes, made of tasks, are represented as a separate “service” or set of services.

BPM with SOA allows you to separate 'what you do' from 'how you do it'. Abstracting the definition of the business processes from how those processes are executed gives businesses greater responsiveness and flexibility.

This separation allows for changes to the business process without significant reengineering of the underlying technology and conversely, it allows for changes to the technology infrastructure without impacting the business process.

For example, allowing for dynamic binding of new, on-the-fly processes whenever the business needs change by being able to change out a supplier with the click of a switch. The vision is the ability to modify a process with out costly discovery time or coding. With SOA everything becomes much more interchangeable allowing the business to focus on the business rather than focusing on the IT.

Kramer

[KathyC]

That sounds promising, but do you have any "real life" examples you can cite?

Kathy

[varjun]

The presence of SOA layer between the business and IT assets facilitates LOB and IT folks to communicate in terms of services and its interfaces. In the absence or SOA both teams would have to communicate in terms of programming language interfaces which is too technical and LOBs are not conformtable with. Presence of SOA facilitates a smooth flow of information between different teams in an organization and also maintains business context throughout increasing the overall efficiency.

[KRBPM]

There are many examples of how BPM is better with SOA than without. Of course you can do BPM without SOA. In fact, our team has worked with 100 of clients and the prevailing thought is that making a change once to their processes or the supporting applications, information access mechanisms, or infrastructure may not require SOA. However, it’s never the first change that is the issue, it’s the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th change that is the issue. The promise of SOA is that it provides the ability to support both the ability to make future process improvement and the ability to make changes to the technology without necessarily impacting both at the same time.

For example, let me talk about a large transportation service company I have worked with. Their business challenge was to enhance their ability to flexibly manage and change financing options and associated lending programs. For example, they couldn’t offer a 0% financing option or more than two promotions at the same time. There were many manual and paper-based processes needed if multiple promotions needed to run at the same time. (for example, 1.9% at 36 months and 2.9% at 24%). Essentially, they had a tightly coupled and inflexible custom developed system.

This client wanted to establish an SOA foundation to provide more flexible infrastructure to support flexible process choices. They chose to model the processes first to understand the environment and also needed to address multiple systems representing multiple processes that included a huge amount of ad-hoc integration points (27 total).

They also needed to expose a 3rd party application function as a reusable service, to be consumed by different applications without the necessity of maintaining multiple applications/services. The 3rd party service (a loan amoritization and calculation engine) was implemented as a process within the main run-time engine and exposed to J2EE applications.

All of this supports their ability to make future changes more easily. Either with the processes or as the technology (applications, environment, DBMS, or other) changes.

Kramer

[ms1mm0]

Hello kathy,
You asked about real life "BPM with SOA" examples.

Here is a nice example that was in the press recently :

http://www.computerworld.com.sg/ShowPage.aspx?pagetype=2&articleid=3681&pubid=3&tab=Home&issueid=90

regards

Mark S

[KRBPM]

Here is another example that provides detail on how SOA helps support a BPM solution:

http://www-306.ibm.com/software/success/cssdb.nsf/CS/HSAZ-6QY2KC?OpenDocument&Site=wp