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Home > CIO News > SOA and BPM: A mutually beneficial partnership |
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The first step is to conduct what Smith calls a business process analysis to identify areas where SOA can be used effectively. In the insurance industry, the first step in nearly any process is to verify the eligibility of the caller or computer user. That's an area where SOA methodology works well, creating a program used by many systems to perform that one task. "I think everyone buys into [SOA]," Smith said. "Now, the question becomes how to cost-effectively deliver on it, not just to understand how it makes sense from a conceptual perspective but how to make it work, and that's where BPM comes in." Leveraging SOA and BPM efficiencies Identifying the steps in key business processes allows a company to uncover critical components and areas where the same information is used across business channels. Then a company can leverage SOA to bring efficiencies in delivering common and vital information. "The intersection of SOA and BPM fundamentally makes sense, but it's still difficult to bring together because of cultures, budgets and organizational constraints," Smith said. "You get out what you put into it. It's relatively easy to plan; the real challenge is bringing the right people to the table." SOA and BPM deployments work best in organizations where the IT department has reached out beyond departmental lines to become an integral part of the business, agreed Fred Dillman, CTO at Unisys Corp., the global technology services and solutions company based in Blue Bell, Pa. That important change has occurred over the past two years as the view of SOA has evolved from being merely a tool to a dynamic way to transform business processes. Case study As TicketsNow was working toward the mid-July launch of its redesigned website, which features increased functionality, IT staff members used BPM methodology to determine areas where the same information could be leveraged in different applications on the website and among partner companies, said Frank Giannantonio, CTO at the online ticket reseller. "The key in SOA is to provide that information in a way that serves your process needs," Giannantonio said. For example, the Crystal Lake, Ill.-based company allows brokers to repackage the information on the TicketsNow site for their own websites. The company's EventInventory division also sells software to brokers to manage back-office functions. The same piece of information could be used in the company's new loyalty program, with its enterprise data warehouse or in its content management system. Before relaunching the TicketsNow site, the IT department spent six weeks on quality assurance and stress testing before the enhancements went live, Giannantonio said. "We didn't have any big surprises," he said. "There were some fixes, but none of them were customer-facing." Business process changes Interest in BPM was high in the late 1980s, Dillman said, but it declined amid a realization that changes were difficult to make. Process improvements that seemed to work on paper wreaked havoc among organizations when they were implemented. The rise of SOA allows those business process changes to be made and thoroughly tested before being used on a wider scale. It also allows smaller changes to be made in a cost-effective manner, Dillman said. The planning process is crucial, Giannantonio said, using the architectural blueprint developed through BPM to determine the areas where SOA has the greatest chance of success. "SOA should be a key step in every IT deployment because it's more cost-effective in the long run," Giannantonio said. "It can be a challenge with 15- or 20-year-old legacy systems that work perfectly well, but a compelling business case can be made if you can show the cost of supporting legacy systems versus new technology." Matt Bolch is a freelance writer based in Atlanta. He can be reached at mbolch@mindspring.com.
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