Moe's SOA & BPM Blog
My informed ramblings on making SOA & BPM work for you.
Some of these come from my infamous but now defunct Alphacourt blog.
Thursday 4 December 2008, 4:21 PM
BPM vs SOA
Over the last five years, SOA has been thrusting its way up the agenda of the chattering IT classes as being the Next Big Thing (or NBT in TLA-speak) for IT analysts and vendors to sell to hard pressed CIOs and IT Directors. The fact that none of the previous NBTs have made a significant difference to their organisations (except additional cost) hasn't deterred people from trumpeting SOA as the latest snake oil.
So it may come as a surprise to some (not me, obviously - see previous blogs) to read Gartner's 2008 CIO Business and Technical Priority lists. Top of the Business priorities is BPM. However, SOA comes a distant 10th (and last) in the Technical priorities list, down 4 places from last year. Oh dear. What has happened? Just as all the IT vendors have finished rebranding their existing products as SOA compliant/enabling/focussed, etc., their customers have binned that part of their IT strategy in favour of two old favourites - BPM and BI (that annoyingly Two Letter Acronym, Business Intelligence), which came top of the Technical Priorities.
My reading of this is that IT has spectacularly failed to articulate the benefits of SOA to their business sponsors. I also think that a sizeable minority of CIOs were never seduced by SOA, or never fully believed the hype. The resurgence of BPM and BI seems to be an indication that the business has become impatient with IT and are looking for tangible and quicker returns on their investments. Given that the second and third Business Priorities are Customer Relations and innovation, there is an obvious emphasis on delivering real business value through more and happier customers being sold better products brought to more markets sooner.
But isn't that what business is all about anyway?
John Moe
PreviousComments on this post
Getting your priorities right
By Jeremy Payne, marketing director, Pegasystems
The fall from grace of SOA as it plummets down the Gartner list of CIO business and technical priorities for 2009 should come as no surprise. It’s not that SOA is a bad idea or offers poor value: the problem is that business people simply cannot get their heads around what it actually is.
In encompassing the whole organisation, SOA has become something of a nirvana – tantalisingly out of reach and a journey which will take years to complete. The industry has singularly failed to present the concept in a way end-users can understand and, as such, as times get tougher it is hardly likely to figure highly on the hard-pressed CEO’s list of ‘must haves’, even if it remains an attractive longer-term goal of some CIOs.
To appeal, it needs a killer application. Enter BPM, as this positively flourishes in environments where SOA is both culturally and practically embraced. And critically, there is a growing understanding that BPM can rapidly deliver on many of SOA’s promises – by enabling an efficient way of managing change and re-use across the enterprise, without creating cumbersome, costly and inflexible legacy.
In a dynamic environment, when dealing with customers through processes, businesses recognise that they need to use data intelligently to ensure their interactions are the right ones, in order to both operate efficiently and provide a positive customer experience.
In achieving this however, what is less well understood is that the Gartner ‘flavours of the year’, BI and BPM are not separate tools, each solving part of the problem. Rather, by creating real time continuous integration between BI and a rules-based BPM platform, the patterns of customer behaviour identified by the BI tool are seamlessly imported into the BPM system, enabling the appropriate proposition to be made automatically when interacting with each customer.
As a result, in today’s acronym war, BI+BPM = ROI NOW is emerging a clear and deserved winner.
