Convergence of BPMS and SOA: Making Beautiful Music Together

As recently as 2005, a leading independent analyst firm estimated that less than 6% of processes within the Global 2000 were fully automated. Given the avalanche of hype surrounding Business Process Management (BPM), this stubborn prevalence of manual and non-standardized processes can seem mysterious.

We’d like to use this letter, the first of a series, to offer an explanation. Today, traditional Business Process Management (BPM) is not as tightly integrated as it must be with Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA). An often overlooked challenge of process management is not the first logical step of automating the process, which traditional BPM tools can do reasonably well; but the ability to continually adapt and change them to changing business needs. Only the convergence of BPM and SOA can automate and most effectively adapt the entire lifecycle of business processes. To understand how this is possible, we’ll first survey the evolution of BPM and SOA, and then explain how your BPM solution ought to be able to blend SOA together in a process-centric approach to business.

Modern BPM was the invention of Frederick Taylor, who revolutionized American management and production environments in the 1920s. Taylor broke every business task down into both a service and a process component. The goal of his systematic management system was to formulate the right process to feed to every service. For example, Taylor employed time and motion studies to optimize business processes for various industrial tasks. All employers had to do was plug the services of workers and machines into the processes to execute them.

“BPM without an underlying pure SOA architecture might look deceptively effective, but is unable to easily scale and adapt processes to changing business needs”

Taylor’s revolution has been challenged since the rise of IT tilted the two-tier process/service approach back in the direction of service. For the first time in decades, many global companies have decided to progressively de-emphasize business processes in favor of an IT-centric approach to operations. In the 1990s in particular, enterprises began to re-engineer their business processes around pre-defined and rigid processes of various large packaged application vendors, rather than the other way around. It was, simply put, insane. The arrival of BPM software in the late 1990s put process back on the map, but didn’t change the existing balance of power. That’s primarily because, as we’ll see, BPM without an underlying pure SOA architecture might look deceptively effective, but is unable to easily scale and adapt processes to changing business needs.

So what is a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA)? It’s a famously unclear term. Even prestigious industry consortia were unable to come up with an official definition for SOA as recently as last year. One easy way to understand SOA is not to reduce it to constituent technology parts, but to employ the metaphor of music. In the on demand world of today, music is a service: we can call it across any medium (piano, cell phone, computer, radio, etc.) whenever we want in whatever medium of transmission (auditorium, MP3, CD, DVD, WAV, etc.) we want. Music serves us at our convenience. In the age of exclusively live music, however, the listener’s experience was very limiting and different. There was only one way to listen to music, one way to play music, and one medium of transmission.

This is analogous to the IT experience before and after SOA. Take a simple example: before SOA, companies used legacy systems to run credit checks. If you wanted to run a credit check, you had to go use the legacy system, often by sitting down at a specific terminal to do so. The new SOA computing paradigm changed all that by liberating the credit check function from specific systems and machines. The “credit check” task now became a standard service that could be evoked by any machine at any time. Just like music in the digital age, the credit check can be accessed across any medium (CRM software, legacy system, portal dashboard, etc.) and any device (PC, PDA, smart phone) whenever we want. SOA is the combination of technologies needed to enable the migration of previously bolted-down, inflexible IT functions into federated, loosely coupled, on-demand services.

“If you think of your business architecture as an orchestra, BPM is the composer and IT is the body of musicians performing the piece. To date, these players have not been on the same stage performing for the same Conductor.”

In the world of SOA, composing and calling these services is easy—maybe even too easy. As a leading analyst said in 2002, “a person with minimal budget and management approval, and no unique skills, can deliver a Web service in a matter of hours.” However, he also warned that, in an age of proliferating services, the enterprise had to “stay ahead of the techies.” Doing so, however, requires the will to understand and govern SOA as part of a larger process-oriented paradigm. However, precisely the opposite approach prevails. The IT industry has oversold SOA while neglecting business process and shareholder value. This is because SOA is easy, while analyzing and optimizing business processes is an arduous, challenging, and continuous task.

Now is the time to simplify business by putting the spotlight back on process. It is process, after all, that can alleviate the most pressing challenges faced by the enterprise, whether it is improving quality, reducing costs, gaining visibility into performance, compliance or process optimization. These pains are at the heart of your business, responsible for your very survival or demise, so they ought to be at the heart of your decision-making as well. In order for that to happen, however, you have to adopt a model in which process becomes the center of your business architecture and SOA becomes the major enabler, not vice versa.

If you think of your business architecture as an orchestra, BPM is the composer and IT is the body of musicians performing the piece. To date, these players have not been on the same stage with the same Conductor. Companies have process objectives, models, and workflows, but no way of rigorously and automatically communicating with the IT components that execute them. Consequently, in the business process landscape, what we are hearing is not a symphony but cacophony.

What’s missing, of course, is a “Conductor.” Enter the Business Process Management Suite (BPMS), which utilizes recent SOA technology to bridge BPM and IT. The Cordys BPMS appeared at just the right time to enable this next generation of BPM solutions. After 2000, wrote a leading independent BPM architect and blogger, “The BPM market needed to be reinvented, and upstart young companies were the only ones who could shake things up enough to do it.” Cordys was part of this wave of BPM solutions, whom she credits with beating the “old guard” to the embrace of  SOA: “Suddenly, we had BPM calling web services, or being called as a web service, in order to speed integration (and eventually become part of the SOA ecosystem).”

“Companies have process objectives, models, and workflows, but no way of rigorously and automatically communicating with the IT components that execute them. Consequently, in the process world, what we hear right now is not a symphony but a cacophony.”

We pride ourselves on having developed the industry’s purest SOA-enabled BPMS. Gartner recently ranked us the most visionary of all vendors in the SOA industry, but our commitment to a new technology paradigm goes back several years and spans several platform iterations.

“High-level business architecture is itself moving to a loosely coupled, componentized, service-oriented paradigm; it makes sense, therefore, to ask if your BPM vendor’s technology architecture is based on SOA principles from ground up.”

At Cordys, one of our inspirations has been the great Dutch master Rembrandt, who seldom retained his first drafts but rather destroyed them in the pursuit of perfection. Rembrandt was seldom satisfied by a single attempt at anything: he produced nearly ninety self-portraits, for example, over the course of five decades. During our early days, our team insisted that Cordys develop our platform from scratch, avoiding the inevitable obsolescence of pre-SOA approaches, but we also leveraged over three decades of our experience in mastering software development, integration and process optimization. Like Rembrandt, over past few years, we have repeatedly redone and refined some of our original ideas and architectures. 

 

Businesses, too, typically never rest content, but continuously create, manage, and adapt business processes. Like a great painter, at Cordys we believe a great process composer never stops depicting and adapting to the changing seasons of business.

Rembrandt’s use of light and darkness also has interesting parallels to what Cordys has achieved with BPM and SOA. Notice how, in each of the portraits above, Rembrandt’s chiaroscuro creates a focal point—the face—balanced by contrasting compositional elements. Your eye first goes to the artist’s face, but then it wanders over the rest of the painting. Similarly, our focal point is the process, but SOA ties together the other elements in our platform. For example, SOA offers several different views of the same process: one for the business analyst, one for the architect, one for the developer, etc. But all of these views are predicated on the same focal point, that of the process and all complement each other to create a single composition.

If you take an SOA-free approach to BPM, you lose the ability to easily create these different points of view; you get an impoverished painting. An analyst recently pointed out that BPM without SOA “would be like a juggler with one hand tied behind his back. He can still do some juggling, but not as effectively and not as fast as it could be.” In an age when BPM has to communicate with a host of databases and enterprise systems, and provide multiple views of complex models, only SOA can automate the integration that goes on behind the scenes and let you juggle as many processes as you want.

In conclusion, SOA has finally made it possible to automate the lifecycle of many business processes by establishing a link between the BPM practice and IT services, but the devil is in the details. In upcoming letters, we will dive into the four key differentiators behind Cordys’ solutions, including advantages in speed, scalability, stability and single-views of your business.  For now we want to conclude with a call to action: If process improvement is truly critical to your business, invest in it until most of your processes—at least IT-overlapping processes—are thoroughly governed by a unified BPMS framework. It is one of the most strategic initiatives you can undertake to maximize your shareholder value in 2007.

We look forward to your comments, so please send to cordysbpms@cordys.com

Sincerely,

	Jan Baan Founder & Chairman Cordys Jan Baan is the driving force behind the vision of Cordys and a proven entrepreneur and philanthropist. With the development of his first software package in 1978, Jan pioneered what was to become the ERP industry and created one of the fastest growing software companies in the world.  He was also instrumental in the successes of WebEx and Top Tier as early investor and advisor.
	Theodoor van Donge Chief Technology Officer Cordys Theodoor van Donge possesses more than 25 years of IT innovation and leadership in the software sector. Together with Jan Baan, Theodoor is recognized for pioneering disruptive technologies focused on process innovation. Theodoor is the key architect behind Cordys BPMS and is responsible for the company’s technology architecture and software development.
	Narry Singh Founder & Chairman Intellidex Group; Advisor to Cordys Narry Singh has almost two decades of experience founding and growing companies that have leveraged disruptive technologies, developing go-to-market strategies, launching products, and building global teams. Narry has served as an advisor to or on boards of several companies and non-profit organizations in the US and India, including World Economic Forum ITC Committee, RecipCo.com, QL2, Line56.com, Cordys, InterWorld and CommerceNet.