BPM and SOA

Question

Hi all,
I would like know your feeling about BPM and SOA.
Are BPM and SOA on top one of the other from a stack point of view ?
Or BPM and SOA are the two sides of the same coin ?
In your opinion is BPM that deliver service orientation or service-orientation comes from something called SOA ?
Thanks in advance for your feedbacks.

Answer 1

Hello Pierluigi,
Business Process Management (BPM) is a term used basically for two things:
1. A way to run, monitor and improve your business execution (the Business part)
2. The name of specific tooling to support the above (the IT part)
There are non-techical aspects of BPM: there can be procudure changes, organization changes, role changes, product changes to achieve the goal of business improvement, which have nothing to do with IT. These are results of strategic, tactical or operational planning. Business process management is just a term for controlling and improving your processes: facilitated by anything which helps. (In BPM projects therefore some things might be better solved NOT trying to get everything automated.)
Where automation can help this, the IT part gets involved.
The IT part of BPM is where processes are modelled, controlled, monitored and changed through tooling. And tooling to run processes like workflow engines or process engines. Any form of process automation can be ranked under BPM. BPM as and IT concept than means that the processes are controlled and monitored by a separate component of your IT archtecture. This component in NOT actually performing system updates or transactions, it is merely administers the process-meta data of the execution, and orchestrates the events and actions which have to be performed to succesfully execute the process.
Where SOA gets involved is when you apply the open web services standard to design your running components in your BPM solution. Web services to utilize and support the process, web services to help the user interaction, web services to support the business transaction, and web services to actually update the systems. So SOA is just a way of implementing and supporting a BPM solution. On enterprise level it is wise to take the SOA route because interoperability is key to make things work, and changes/additions/integrations can be made far more easily when using the open web services definition rather than proprietary implementations.
The SOA design concept can also be used in non-BPM scenarios. When defining re-usable services which accomodate just simple transactions or look-up functions where no specific workflow is involved (PO Box lookup, search functions, etc.), web services can be a great way of providing an open interface to business logic.
Summarizing: BPM and SOA are two completely separate concepts and can be implemented without each other. However, when applied on enterprise level, the SOA design pattern will help you achieve the business agility goals you might have with your BPM implementation.
I hope this helps making things clear.
Regards, Edo van de Velde