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SOA Is SOL Without BPM
By Rob Risany
Expert Author
Article Date: 2007-03-13
Being in marketing, it's particularly fascinating how the perspectives of customers and vendors evolve on "the latest thing".
The SOA wars have been interesting to watch for exactly this reason. Integration vendors, pure-play BPM vendors and leading application platforms all have an SOA story. Education focuses attempt to teach people what SOA is and how it can make their infrastructures more "agile". And while attendance in these forums is still high, SOA is failing in many companies. .
Take, for example, a recent Forrester Research Survey that found that 38% of companies with more than 1,000 employees are not using SOA and have no plans to. Of the companies that are using SOA in some form or fashion, 40% haven't begun or are using SOA with no clear strategy in place.
One key reason is that the SOA value proposition is fundamentally unimportant to business people who, after all, bankroll new technology initiatives. It's just another way to implement an application. What's more important to business managers is how they can change, through technology, how their businesses are run. And that's where BPM comes in. If the world's biggest-budgeted software vendors really want to have sponsors in both IT and business units, and keep selling software, they need to elevate the role BPM plays in their suites.
Too add some color to these statistics, these vignettes illustrate the trouble in which SOA is finding itself:- At a major industry conference an IT executive from a major bank was expounding on their success in migrating to an SOA in the business. He had SOAPs and WSDLs and fine grained web services - he had API wrappers, BPEL orchestration and data models. About 20 minutes into his exposition on the architectural approach that this 24 month project has taken, the attendee sitting next to me leaned over said "who cares about this anyway? Does this guy think business people CARE?!"
- I led a panel discussion - this one geared solely to an IT audience. I asked a question of the panel. "SOA - friend or foe of the business?" Every person on the panel, including one employed by a Fortune 50 company said "it should never be discussed with the business" - it needed to be neither seen nor heard.
- At another conference I sat in on a session where a successful SOA architect / project program leader laid out a few different options for deploying SOA. These included:
- 1. Creating a global SOA strategy and push it into every bit of the business - force SOA everywhere, all at once.
- 2. Implement SOA as part of each point project. He referred to it as the "bury approach" as it was designed to bury the costs of SOA implementation under the radar;
- 3. Just "say you're doing SOA" and then ignore it altogether - the rationale being that most business people don't know what it is anyway. So long as you can say that "it's a priority" you sound like you're doing the right thing - then the pursuit of the status quo is at least given a veneer of "service-centricity"
All of these stories as well as the statistics make me cringe. SOA is yet another buzzword - separating the technology haves from the have-nots. A shift is already underway.
Is Gartner's classic "Trough of Disillusionment" permanent?
Gartner Group first proclaimed that SOA was entering the trough of disillusionment in 2005. While everyone's hoping it is the trough, SOA is certainly ebbing in terms of expectations. But what's interesting about the cycle this go around, as opposed to the hype shifts in other technology areas, is who's driving the shift.
In the cases of integration (message bus I vs. point to point ) business intelligence (centralized vs. decentralized data-warehousing) or even programming itself (functional vs. object oriented design), the "trendiness" "mood" or "hype cycle" of the particular architectural movement was solely in the realm of technologists - technocrats identified an approach, recruited converts to the new way of thinking, adopted it, and inevitably morphed it into something more practical or palatable in real world application.
With SOA however, the people who are changing the mood aren't technologists -- they are business people that own mission critical areas of the business. The shift in budget control post-dot-com is not the only thing that has emboldened business people. The ebb of SOA is a revolt by business people against yet another buzzword invented by IT.
Let them eat cake?
SOA started as an architectural philosophy of "good hygiene" for technology build-out. No one would or does argue that treating the discrete functions of the business (as embodied in technology systems) as reusable web services is inherently bad. But the push of big platform companies to make SOA into a compelling sales situation turned it into a front page news story. Business people read the story - and they immediately put their guards up around IT's new buzzword.
The reaction on technologists' part has largely followed the usual path, as my vignettes illustrate. "Just don't talk to the business about it," "That's technology stuff, they don't have to worry about it," "just bury this architectural approach into your project scope, even if it raises the cost a bit" Effectively, IT says "There is a wall here based upon my ability to understand these complicated things don't cross it - it's my problem not yours"
The message delivered is not meant to be divisive, nor condescending. Rather, over time working with business people who don't want to mettle with "unnecessary details," IT people have grown accustomed to just "deal with it."
The king is dead
What's different this time around however is that more and more business people recognize that the company's ability to meet core objectives like customer satisfaction, profitability, and compliance are in-inextricably bound to the technology systems which support the business' operations. This time around business people aren't willing to be held at arm's length. They want a role and if they don't get it, they'll stop any initiative and pull budgets ruthlessly.
This new role for the business has taken IT by surprise in some situations. Business people are getting into their world more and more. The places where IT has been used to being undisputed ruler has evolved into more of a partnership. There is no king.
SOA therefore is not like other technology trends, gradually absorbed into the usual day-to-day operations of the IT organization. Rather SOA's success as a technology approach is faced with a shift in the fabric of the relationship between business and IT. Organizations that successfully cope with both the technology trend and the cultural shift will gain the elusive "agility." Those that don't will find that SOA dies a lingering death amidst a cry for more business-user driven solutions
The Balancing Act
If we recall the vignette at the beginning of this article, a technical architect suggested 3 different options for "doing SOA." All three reflected the old way of thinking about the cultural fabric of the business. I propose a fourth approach for enabling an SOA strategy. Give business people a reason to care about SOA - give them BPM
Business Process Management or BPM gives many businesses an approach which balances the architectural benefits of SOA against the cultural shift which business people are demanding. BPM embodies both a technology approach to support business agility as well as a management philosophy which promotes it.
On the technology side, business process management suites bring to the IT organization the tools they need to build open, web-service enabled infrastructures that leverage their underlying systems and span traditional functional silos like sales, marketing, engineering & finance. The BPMS technology includes capabilities for designing secure yet flexible mission critical solutions which scale to the needs of the largest businesses.
The management philosophy of BPM empowers business people to think about the processes which affect their day to day lives and operations. It gives them a new role in defining requirements - in their terms - yet creates a common language for business & IT to address real implementation level concerns (like scope, objectives, and end-user expectations).
Putting BPM into play in your business will do two things therefore. First it will create a common language between business & IT to discuss real-world business problems stripped of buzzwords. It enables people with different skillsets and perspectives to sit down and model out (using modeling tools) the issues about which they need to think. This common communication layer (the process model) will gradually evolve directly into a running solution in the business. This gives the business a sense of ownership in the life of the technologies which support the business.
Secondly, BPM supports IT's drive for system flexibility and reusability, By pushing more capabilities to business people in identifying project objectives using modeling tools, IT is freed to focus on building clean, web service enabled applications based on the architectural concepts embodied in SOA.
Long Live the King
This role of BPM as the business face of SOA is not just a possibility. It's happening now. The same Forrester study which found people struggling to adopt SOA drilled into the details of those with successful SOA strategies.
It found that of the North American businesses with clear SOA strategies, more than 90% of them felt that BPM was an important part of that strategy.
If you're thinking about pursuing SOA in 2007 or have started and aren't making much progress remember. SOA is SOL without BPM.
About the Author:
Rob Risany is Director of Product Marketing for Savvion, and is responsible for setting the direction and positioning of Savvion's products and services so that they meet customer requirements. Mr. Risany brings more than 10 years experience in software marketing including business process management, business intelligence, enterprise integration, and operational support systems. Prior to Savvion, Mr. Risany helped launch Orb Networks and AIM Technology in the United States, delivering marketing strategies and tactics which led to double-digit year-on-year growth for both companies. Mr. Risany holds a BS in Psychology and Communications from the University of Illinois.
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