Which comes first...SOA or BPM?

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Michael Stamback's Blog | June 18, 2007   8:39 AM | Comments (2)

This past week I had the chance to attend the Gartner Application Architecture, Development, and Integration show and attended a session by Paolo Malinverno on BPM and SOA.  His presentation focused on the various aspects of both BPM and SOA and how they share a common goal - to increase enterprise agility.  While they can both be successful independent of each other, its the combination that really drives business alignment and success.  As one of my colleagues likes to say, BPM and SOA are like chocolate and peanut butter.  By themselves they are good, but they're best when together. 

During the question and answer session at Paolo's presentation, I thought a very good question was asked: Which do I do first?  BPM?  or SOA?  Talk to a BPM guy and they'll tell you BPM needs to be first.  Talk to an SOA guy and they'll tell you the same thing?  So who's right?  The answer is that neither is wrong, but neither is right either. 

The path that an organization takes in terms of which comes first is determined by the goals of that organization.  If no SOA investment exists, but they are looking to optimize processes that are heavily human activity centric, BPM is probably the best place to start.  If they are looking to expose business services for reuse and re-composition to meet new business demands, then perhaps SOA is the best place to start.  The bottom line, however, is that to truly be successful and agile, an organization should invest in both.

Many organizations are embarking down SOA to create reusable services that can be re-combined and composed in new ways to meet changing business demands.  So what's the best way to do this?  That's right....BPM.  BPM provides business analysts with a means to provide an understanding of how a process is orchestrated.  That orchestration can, and in most cases does, involve the use of SOA services.  This allows the business to get faster and better value out of their SOA.

So what about BPM?  If you are doing BPM without the existence of SOA, you run a risk of decreasing your agility while increasing your cost of ownership.  Without SOA, your business processes will continue to create custom, brittle application integrations that are non-flexible and have to be maintained.  So while you're getting return from improved process control, your ability to modify those processes and the IT components within them becomes limited without the use of SOA.

So, which comes first?  BPM? or SOA?  I think where to start is a business decision, but at the end of the day, both are required. 

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