BPM and SOA

[former_member239282]

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.

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

Hi,

BPM has been there long time before SOA born. The BPM tools, such as business modeling, workflow engine, etc are already created.

But with the new technologies and standard such as SOA, BPMN, BPML, BPEL, etc, the people can develop BPM better than before. So, it is not directly interrelated. But, if both of the solutions are combined and supporting each other, then it will become a very good solution.

Syarif Achmad

[Former Member]

Hello everybody,

the idea of BPM was born before the marketing hype about web-services and subsequent propagation of SOA begun.

The biggest challenge by BPM as an instrument within Service Oriented World is that a business expert/analyst in most of the cases will delegate the implementation of business process to IT. The same story happened with the great ideas of business rules management systems, decision support system etc. And from the IT-Point of view, where is the difference to implement something with XML or with i.e. Java?

What do you think is able to motivate a business expert to use BPM? Do you know companies, where business experts without IT know-how are designing business processes based on BPM notation?

Best regards,

Michail.

[Former Member]

hi Pierluigi,

those links given by Sumit are very good ones, nevertheless I want to pint out that, IMHO, both reflect the so-called suit's (business people, marketing peoplple) view of the matter.

From the first paper I read

<i>...(The fact that SOA uses the Internet and XML protocols is of interest to technologists, but that is a small part of the overall SOA approach.) ...</i>

Business people seem not to understand that the sucess of the whole SOA story depends very much on the careful choice of the underlying technologies, i.e. using standardized and well established (beyond specific companies' commercial interests) technologies, architectural patterns and so on. Though SOA principles do not predefine any protocol or technology bindings (e.g., you can easily think of a SOA confined to the SAP world only using RFC and home-grown datatypes) most of the benefits are yielded when using well established technologies, protocols, patterns.

<i>...The essence of SOA is that business managers can model processes...</i>

IMHO this is very much wishful thinking and marketing chatter. It might well be in the near future that managers will be able to use visual tools to create processes, even enterprise scale and sustainable ones, but I put a bet on it that it will always remain 'commodity processes', processes which will not give the owner a USP over there competitors. The outstanding will always remain those managers/companies who have a good mixture of knowledge of the business requirements AND the capabilities of the underlying technologies and who are able to adopt/evolve both to yield the best solution possible at the time needed.

It doesn't take you much to create another search engine, but you have to be outstandingly innovative if you want to be Google. The same statement holds true for the bookstore/Amazon combo.

My 2 cents on your questions:

<i>Are BPM and SOA on top one of the other from a stack point of view ?</i>

BPM is a natural next step once you have a SOA in place. IMHO it's on top of a SOA, though BPM doesn't require SOA (e.g. when your processes do not stretch across distributed systems or services you might as well do some intra-application BPM)

<i>is BPM that deliver service orientation or service-orientation comes from something called SOA</i>

Nope, BPM does not deliver service orientation.

Service-orientation comes frome something like SOA, latter meaning <b>Service Oriented Architecture</b>

regards, anton

[sbhutani1]

Hi Pierluigi,

Please refer this article for a complete understanding of both of these concepts

https://www.sdn.sap.com/irj/sdn/go/portal/prtroot/docs/library/uuid/300935e1-cc6e-2910-3b8d-ea8fdf97...

also refer to this blog for a strategy of SOA and BPM in Netweaver

/people/lakshmikanth.adiraju/blog/2006/09/19/soa-bpm-business-applications-netweaver-happy-customer

Regards

Sumit Bhutani