BPM in Action

The upcoming ebizQ "SOA in Action" Virtual Conference (sign up here) got me thinking about the interrelationship between business process management (BPM) and services oriented architecture (SOA). More accurately it got me thinking whether that relationship and all the related buzzwords have changed much since I did my 2007 look-back/2008 look-ahead research just a few short months ago.

The macro-economic outlook has sure changed although a less dramatic correction was accurately predicted. The changes caused by the worldwide recession--whether use of that term is academically accurate or not--to IT economics are real. What everyone thought would be a slight slowdown in IT spending growth back in January 2008 is now looking like it might turn into 2001-like deflation, with another pullback in IT spending to follow in 2009. The buzzwords have even changed as the short-lived Enterprise 2.0 has given away to a hundred shades of "green."

But down in the stack, where changes are measured in decades rather than Internet minutes, there really isn't a lot of change. This illustration shows the movement in stack technology over the last 20 years, a movement that progressed during 2008 but did not really change course.

At the top of the stack now, as compared to during the 1990s and the early years of this decade, BPM (including Knowledge Management--KM), have replaced CRM/ERP/etc. applications as the first line of interaction for users. Enterprises are increasingly focused on applications and infrastructure that directly improve their business processes and enhance the handling of their intellectual property (IP), and less on simply "keeping the books." But as is always the case with IT, CRM/ERP/etc. have not gone away but have simply been pushed down the stack. Business intelligence (BI) should be described in here somewhere as well to the extent it differs from KM.

SOA, on the other hand, is increasingly the key to the middle of the stack. A services view that began with object orientation in the 1980s has slowly replaced a discrete view of data, middleware and other types of servers, a view that pretended that they were all somehow different and not just all strings of zeros and ones.

Within a decade all business processes will be handled by BPM software using the broadest definition of that term. Within a decade all software will be implemented using SOA. Neither exists in a vacuum but they each represent important separate development and market characteristics. Together and separately, SOA and BPM will drive the other major trends in IT: Software as a Service (SaaS), cloud computing, and open source terms and conditions.

It's OK to bunch all those buzzwords in one sentences as long as you remember that BPM is a value proposition, cloud computing is a technology, open source is a licensing device (and a culture), SaaS is one of a dozen ways you can buy software and SOA is just what it says--an architecture.

-- Dennis Byron