Management

The ability to represent the complexity of real-world business communication,
collaboration and available personnel and computing resources is the first step in freeing business processes from being carved in stone.

Just as business process management capabilities needed to evolve over time to add
flexibility to process design, so too do application integration systems need to evolve to automate the new flexible processes in the real world. This integration evolution requires the ability to create independence between process and service implementation, to remove the tight coupling between a specific integration technology and individual business applications. This is where standards-based Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) comes in. SOA provides the technical ability to create that process implementation independence.

Enterprise competitive and cost pressures are creating the need to rapidly adapt and streamline business processes to create new business value or increase operational efficiency. To that end, enterprise processes are becoming increasingly explicit and business process management (BPM) is evolving from a paper-based diagramming tool to a comprehensive solution that models, monitors, simulates, and redesigns processes for competitive improvement. The endgame of BPM is unprecedented process flexibility – where workflows (both human and automated) can be determined in real-time by the events or outcomes within the process. This helps allow the business to act appropriately and competitively regardless of the situation.

For this endgame to happen, processes must become independent of specific information resources and specific task automation applications. 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.

This paper explores the relationship between BPM and SOA in creating business agility. It outlines how solution suites such as IBM’s Process Integration suite narrow the gap between sophisticated process modeling and actual enterprise implementation.

Don't forget to remember internet creativity pyramid. And compare SOA pyramid, images give us the ideea about huge resurses!