Welcome to the August issue of Exec2Exec Voice. This month’s newsletter maintains our steady focus on Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) best practices, but it provides a special emphasis on business process management (BPM). It’s one of the key topics we’ll be discussing at this year’s worldwide summit of SOA thought leadership, BEAWorld 2006. In this column I would like to summarize what our customers’ experience is teaching us about the business-critical relationship between SOA and BPM.

Business processes are the essential building blocks of business strategy. Every interaction a business has with its customers, partners, suppliers, and with its own employees is made up of business processes. It’s no surprise that executives are focusing greater attention on the quality of their organizations’ business process management. Today’s increasingly complex business processes—filled with deeper interactions across systems, and featuring richer collaboration among users—call out for a new dimension in business process management capability. Here is where SOA delivers yet another compelling business argument.

Business process management and SOA have been topics of deep interest among IT professionals for years, but until recently they were discussed and examined separately. Today, as we work with customers moving to SOA and learn from their practical experience, it is becoming clear that although BPM can be effectively deployed without SOA, there is a strong synergistic benefit in combining BPM’s set of coordinated activities with the architectural benefits of SOA.

Enterprises can implement BPM suites without a SOA, but—in the long run—why would they? Without SOA, BPM’s integration with underlying applications and databases becomes increasingly complex as the enterprise scales the solution across ever-larger groups of users, often employing disparate systems that are in a constant state of dynamic change.

There are many IT systems sufficiently compact and stable to optimally support BPM without SOA—at first. If companies choose a BPM suite with sufficiently rich connectivity to underlying applications and databases, they will at first get the benefits of BPM without a SOA. But this initial success contains the seeds of its own downfall: As more departments come online, more managers have a hand in controlling the IT environment. And as the system’s growth necessitates more changes, the BPM solution will soon be suffering the coordination, integration, and management problems SOA was invented to solve.

Our customers’ experience shows that the optimal approach to unleashing the full potential of BPM and SOA—aligning business and IT to weave people, systems, processes, and services together—is:

• Establish good communication and planning between business operations teams and IT architects to plan a coordinated rollout of BPM and, down the line, SOA.
• Choose the right products—a BPM suite that offers rich native connectivity without SOA, but one that is SOA-enabled for integrated operations when the enterprise chooses to implement a SOA.

The worldwide summit of SOA thought-leadership is BEAWorld, our annual series of customer, partner, and technology conferences held in North America, Europe, and Asia. BEAWorld 2006 is designed to deliver maximum value to our executive audience by offering specialized sessions and tracks that give business executives real-world customer examples of how SOA, BEA, and our partners are delivering tangible business value—and how you can profit from this information. I invite you to mark your calendars now for BEAWorlds in San Francisco (September 19-21), Prague (October 10-12), and Beijing (December 13-14). More information and registration is available at BEAWorld.

I hope you find this edition of Exec2Exec Voice enlightening and valuable. If there is anything you would like to see in future issues, please let us know. We value your feedback.

Cheers!

Alfred Chuang
Chairman and CEO
BEA Systems