James Taylor’s blog on ebizq points to another piece on that site which asserts not only, as James paraphrases, that BPM and SOA are no “silver bullet” for the business-IT alignment problem, but that they are at their core no different from all previous attempts to bridge the business-IT gap.  Zygmunt Jackowski, PhD, who describes himself as a BPM Specialist with the Australian Department of Immigration and Multicultural Affairs, poses the question this way:

1. Apart from all the hype, is the BPM/SOA approach at its core different from what have been tried before to bridge the business-IT gap?

2. Is there any breakthrough feature (technological, methodological or perhaps architectural) that poses BPM/SOA approach as a likely winner over the previous attempts?

He goes on to say:

My answer to both of the questions above is ?No? and I will address them in later commentaries. This means that not denying all the advantages that BPM/SOA approach brings with it (a list of which one can find on BPM/SOA Websites of their choice) we are still not any closer to resolving the issue of bridging the business-IT divide.

The title of the piece is “Bridging the IT-Business Gap With BPM and SOA (Part I).”  Oy.