Derek Miers called my attention over the weekend to two posts from the SOA blogosphere suggesting “bad blood” between BPM and SOA, framing it as the latest proxy war in an age-old struggle between business and IT. I suppose Derek, who doesn’t blog himself (yet), wanted me to point out how ridiculous this is (or at least embarrass myself trying). Anyway, I’m taking the bait.
The original cherry bomb was thrown by Christoper Koch in CIO Magazine’s blog, who described BPM vs SOA as “a new front developing in the war between business and IT,” and Joe McKendrick on ZDNet quickly poured gasoline on the flames. Koch tries to set himself above the fray but tips his hand by centering the discussion on business’s frustration with IT’s lack of agility and concluding that SOA is more likely to foster agility than anything he sees from the BPM camp. Thus, like most discussions of BPM from the SOA world, he gets a few facts right but generally misses the point.
Agility is important, and SOA is all about agility, but agility is really IT’s concern and not the central focus of business executives, nor is dealing with change the key objective of BPM. Better aligning processes with business goals; making processes faster, more efficient, and more reliably compliant with policies and best practices; making business performance more visible even when the process crosses organizational or system boundaries, and more actionable in real time… these are just as important as agility to business.
Koch’s ephiphany came at a recent BPM conference, where it dawned on him that “veterans of the
Yes it’s true, BPM people and SOA people are concerned about mostly different things, but they are hardly opposing armies facing off with guns blazing. As a veteran of BPM conferences myself, I can vouch for the fact that the keynoting class there does tend to put forth a generally anti-technology message, but I think more directed against vendors of BPM software than at IT architects laying the groundwork for SOA.
The grain of truth buried in this pseudo-war is IT’s discomfort with the BPM notion that implementation of business process solutions can and should be, at least in part, driven by models created by “the business,” the so-called top-down approach. Some in IT would rather take a few years to roll out a complete SOA infrastructure before thinking about orchestrating a few services to solve business problems. For some reason, they don’t understand BPM’s top-down model-initiated approach can actually accelerate the SOA rollout by fostering business-IT alignment with concrete performance metrics, and encouraging an iterative approach to the production implementation.
Assuming Koch does speak for at least a segment of the IT community, my take-away from all this is that BPM software vendors need to address IT’s concern that BPM is “unsafe” technology. So far their message has mainly addressed business values and concerns, and while they give frequent lip service to SOA, they haven’t really addressed how BPM can help IT in its transition to SOA.
BPM and SOA are natural allies, not enemies. While outrageous headlines and trumped-up issues are the staple of the blogosphere, this is one we can do without.
You are right Bruce – I am planning on blogging a bit when I get my act together (once I get back from “holiday”). I explored the whole notion of the relationship between BPM and SOA in a white paper (available FOC at http://www.enix.co.uk) … I am not trying to advertise my stuff … no doubt I shall get down to my blogging in the coming weeks.
But hey – who appointed these “experts”. Seems to me they are part of the spin machine that is trying to put BPM back in the IT bottle (which would suit some of the big SOA based vendors).
But the genie is out of the bottle, with business people taking the lead on driving change in their businesses. It was refreshing to meet a few business people at BPM Think Tank who really do “get it”. Not only are they getting it, they are using it to drive massive improvements in performance within their businesses).
Zero-Sum Thinking…
Kudos to Bruce Silver for an even-handed response to the “SOA vs. BPM” debate that’s sure to capture some blog readers, but unfortunately do not clarify the issue for thoughtful people (see Christopher Koch at cio.com and Joe McKendrick at…
I think the argument about who should do this, the business or IT, miss the point. The value comes from technologies that let the business and IT collaborate to solve the organization’s problems. BPM, SOA, business rules all require some technical infrastructure and know-how and some business expertise and drive. If both sides would just admit that they can’t do the other’s job and figure out how to work together we would make faster progress!
[…] Bruce Silver recently weighed in on the matter, noting that there is, in reality, little tension between the two disciplines, which, while converging, have distinctly different roles to play: "Agility is important, and SOA is all about agility, but agility is really IT’s concern and not the central focus of business executives, nor is dealing with change the key objective of BPM. Better aligning processes with business goals; making processes faster, more efficient, and more reliably compliant with policies and best practices; making business performance more visible even when the process crosses organizational or system boundaries, and more actionable in real time… these are just as important as agility to business." […]
Bruce,
Those are interesting articles and I think your comments bring a good perspective on the some of the right issues, and I would add:
? SOA and BPM are complimentary. SOA empowers IT by making it more agile to support business requirements today, and in the future. BPM empowers the business by giving it the right tools to fully participate in the definition, creation and management of process centric applications and services.
? In some areas, IT has miss-perceptions about BPM based on earlier generations of products where various limitations existed, such as they were great on modeling, but did not provide a way to use the model as the way to generate a process based application for deployment and execution, etc. Many people need to understand that the current generation of BPMS products are not only ?safe?, but can accelerate the ability for companies to reach the benefits of a service oriented architecture approach.
? A major value of today?s BPMS products is that IT really appreciates the concept of a model driven approach where a shared process model reinforces architectural best practices (i.e. service reusability, process templates, etc). Meanwhile, the Business really appreciates the collaborative environment BPMS products foster so that they can fully participate in the definition, creation and management of processes that drive the completion of work tasks across people and systems while providing visibility into business performance and optimization opportunities.
Obviously, at BEA we are providing customers support for both BPM and SOA with our products and solutions. We see these are highly complementary in helping customers be better aligned to reach their current business objectives and the ones they will have in the future which they do not even know about today. Seems like the headlines should be more about ?Understanding how to leverage BPM and SOA?
Shane,
I agree with you, but here is an interesting data point on the state of the market (or should I say markets) today. Brainstorm has a series of colocated BPM and SOA conferences. I give my standard BPMS talk at the BPM conference and this year proposed a separate talk on “Building BPM Solutions Using SOA and BPEL” for the SOA conference. But the head of Brainstorm said that would be too confusing for the SOA audience so I had to change it to “Orchestrating Services with BPEL.”
[…] Don’t ask me how, but Ismael turned the hubbub over BPM vs SOA into a discussion of top-down vs “middle-out.” Both threads (including comments) are semi-instructive, but somehow in the course of things he challenged me to come up with proof that top-down (i.e. BPM implementation driven from the business model) has ever worked. The challenge came in the form of a double-dog dare, with the promise of a trip to Hawaii tacked on if I could come up with 3 top-down implementations that met his “BPM 2.0″ qualifiiers. Doubting he was good for the Maui deal, I reduced it to a simple dinner bet, so now we both have some skin in the game. […]
Yes, I can tell from the questions I have been asked the last couple months that IT is confused by what exactly is meant by BPM, BPMS, etc. Business people also can be confused or even stop you mid-stream when they hear you say SOA as many times it is not relevant to their view of what they require. This of course is the result of the industry being in the middle of a transition to the next wave of products and solutions and the differing views on what is complimentary and how customers will best achieve success. And of course people also seem to forget that people buy “products” that implement standards and not just standards. I think Brainstorm should have let you keep the original title and then given you the opportunity to explain where BPEL, XPDL, BPMN and other standards are being used for BPM, Orchestrating Services, etc.
[…] The above definition is consistent with Bruce Silver's comments in The Phony “War” Between BPM and SOA. I completely agree with Bruce that BPM and SOA are natural allies, not enemies. SOA is quite simply about how you structure your enterprise application, and that you use open standard protocols to link the pieces. SOA says nothing about having a business-relevant model, or which philosophical approach you take to building your application. SOA is another one of those things that BPM is not. Yet, BPM and SOA are perfectly compatible for developing applications that help people to coordinate their work and make their organization more efficient and effective. […]
BPM and SOA 2…
The separation between Inside/Outside (or Private/Public) is of course a crucial element of the component/service story. The belly of the whale is a metaphor for encapsulation. In Frye’s version, BPM is on the inside and SOA is on the outside. From a …
[…] BPDM supports the convergence of BPM and SOA that is suggested by Bruce Silver in "The Phony War between BPM and SOA." This convergence will put business people back in control. Bruce notes the discomfort of IT people […]
[…] IT and the Business," is a competition between specialists. As suggested by Bruce Silver in "The Phony War between BPM and SOA," BPM people and SOA people are not concerned about different things, they are concerned about the […]