BPM/SOA INTEGRATION: “AN ASSESSMENT METHOD TOWARDS ESTABLISHING A ROADMAP FOR BPM/SOA CONVERGENCE”

Abstract

The instability of a global market which is already besieged by constant crises over the past several years coupled with enterprises competitiveness and cost cutting pressures are small number of challenges businesses encounter. In addition, businesses are required to be agile and rapidly adapt to changes as they occur while creating new business values as well as increase efficiency. Furthermore, globalization not only introduced international competitors but also opportunities for collaboration. Consequently, faster information transfer mechanisms which facilitate prompt and swift decision making are essential for establishing such global, agile and adaptive organization.

To deal with these challenges as well as guarantee the survival and profitability of the business, organizations turned to IT. Investing heavily in IS and harnessing IT to manage different aspects of the business as well as meet those challenges (KO, Lee & Lee, 2008). IT solutions promise great flexibility, more automation and new products/business opportunities introduced as a result of new technologies. Over the past a few years, Business Process Management Systems (BPMs) and Services Oriented Architecture (SOA) are examples of such IT solutions which have been proposed as evolutionary initiatives that enable organizations become more agile through better flexibility and better reusability that lower costs and increase efficiency (Kamoun, 2007).

According to Gartner (2006) BPM is a management discipline that requires shift to process-centric thinking and reduce organizations reliance on traditional territorial and functional structures. BPM is supported by methods, techniques and software to design, enact, control and analyze operational processes (Aalst et al. 2003). This process-centric view supported by advanced tools and functionalities enable process automation as well as continuous analysis and optimization of the process. Therefore, offering solutions to mitigate a number of challenges organizations face. At the end of 2006 the Business Process Management Systems (BPMS) market reached US$1.7 billion in total revenue (Hill et al. 2007) and it was forecasted it would raise to an estimated to $6.3 billion by 2011 (Forster, 2007). This is a clear indication to the optimism surrounding BPM and how organizations received it. However, to achieve the process flexibility that BPM promises, processes themselves must be independent of any specific information resource or task automation application. In addition, the integration technology should loosely couple resources and application that make up the process (Noel, 2005). In general, the underlying IT infrastructure is seldom flexible and contains high level coupling (Gopala, 2006). This rigid infrastructure and high coupling will result in the logic of a process being hard coded into a certain technology which completely defeats the purpose of BPM. This where SOA comes in, providing the technical ability and the platform to establish process independency. SOA is an architectural style for developing distributed systems which advocates loose coupling of components hence allowing greater flexibility. SOA itself is not a specific technology, but it is applicable to many technologies. Services are created and modified without impacting the users of those services. In addition, services have stable and clear interface definition which eradicates the need to know the implementation details. These characteristics of services under the SOA paradigm eliminate all issues on the technical level which hinder a successful BPM implementation.

BPM and SOA are developed as radical and evolutionary initiatives that will enable enterprises become more agile. Although undoubtedly both can be pursued and implemented independently for instance, BPM can be successfully deployed relying on proprietary infrastructure and similarly SOA can utilize Business Process Execution Language (BPEL) standards (Kamoun, 2007). The combination of SOA and BPM is more powerful than either one alone (Gopala, 2006; Rosen, 2009a). In addition, this synergy between BPM and SOA is rather obvious and many believe both are natural complement for one another (Brunswick, 2008; Kamoun, 2007). However, leveraging these two concepts presents a challenge in itself mainly because of the different nature of both concepts. For example, BPM is business driven and uses top-down process approach on the other hand; SOA is IT driven and uses bottom-up architectural approach. There are several obstacles and challenges organizations must overcome to bring the two concepts together and obtain maximum advantage offered by this synergy. For instance, assessing the maturity and alignment of both is essential and a prerequisite for bringing them together. Moreover, the attainment of the required alignment to leverage both concepts necessitates major organizational transformation (Gopala, 2006; Kamoun, 2007; Woodley, 2005). Even with the identification and attainment of the required alignment, combining the two concepts is far from a straightforward process. The gap between the business approach of BPM and the IT view of SOA should be narrowed which also means one or both concepts have to be tailored to create the sought after successful and beneficial union. There is obvious gap between the business needs and what the IT can actually deliver. Furthermore, this gap includes other aspects such the reliability of IT’s ability to fully understand and translate the business needs in order to deliver an optimal solution which meets these needs.

This research project focuses on examining the BPM/SOA integration holistically in order to identify key aspect for a successful integration. Furthermore, utilizing these aspects to asses organizations’ BPM/SAO integration initiative not only to determine where these organizations stand in the integration journey but also help organization devise their own development roadmap. The research is based on extensive literature study combined with experts interviews analyzing various aspect of the BPM/SOA integration. Main areas which were examined and analyzed were BPM/SOA differences, challenges between both concepts, challenges hindering integration, maturity models and different approaches proposed to achieve a successful integration. The key results and contributions of this research project are 1- Critical Success Factors For BPM/SOA integration 2- Conceptual BPM/SOA integration approach 3- An assessment tool to gauge the level of BPM/SOA integration

The Critical Success Factors are derived from comprehensive analysis of best practices as well as common pitfall in the field of practice pitfalls. They are operationlized in the assessment method to scan organizations and determine their level of readiness for a successful integration initiative.