As enterprises grow, IT will also expand and grow to meet the needs of each enterprise at each level. But the existing IT infrastructure including off-the-shelf system or customized systems are often growing in age and their architecture lacks flexibility, and are hard to integrate. Yet when leaders that are in the frontlines of the market facing more market competition, they hope that IT can quickly react and provide support; however, often they cannot receive the needed support immediately. So “slow” seems to be the common statement of judgment from battle departments towards the IT department.

Faced with the situation described above, how to plan the proper enterprise IT strategy? I believe that most of you have all heard of many new terminology that hopefully would resolve the above problems, such as SOA (Service-Oriented Architecture), BPM (Business Process Management), and Web Services. These terminologies used at various different marketing events may have been interpreted differently and given different meanings. So how to clarify their statuses? From my experience during the past few years in interacting with customers and servicing customers the BPM area, I would like to start by explaining BPM and SOA, and discuss the relationship and status of Web Services, BPEL (Business Process Execution Language), BPMN (Business Process Modeling Notation), and other related popular terminology. It is hoped that readers will not be confused and actually learn new concepts during the next seminar on a related topic.

When SOA was proposed in the 1990s, it was targeted at software design concepts and the architecture to integrate software. As a result, technologies such as CORBA, RMI, DCOM, and even technologies that utilize Sockets, can create systems that consist of SOA architecture. But under new definitions that places emphasis on loose coupling and technology neutral, SOA has gradually become an architecture and design concept based on standard network computing technologies. Its goal is to transform business functions into internet based services. Of course standard network computing technologies refers to SOAP, WSDL, UDDI, and other technologies derived from security, information reliability, and related Web Services technology, such as WS-Reliable Messaging and WS-Security. Web Services has became one of the basic components in building SOA, currently most information discussing SOA are closely connected to Web Services. Yet, when extending up from SOA, information authorization and conversion, distribution of content based information, load balancing, and various configurations, deployments, and monitoring management mechanisms, are added. This resulted in the emergence of Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) that surpasses the concept, technology, and architecture levels, replacing the old EAI system as the next generation Business Integration Platform.

Quite the opposite, BPM is focused on management. Yet, BPM system is formed by various BPM tools and process engines. Since it is focused on management, its emphasis is on continual process management, and not a single one time perfect solution. Therefore, when introducing BPM into an organization, it not only needs the BPM based process systems, but more importantly is to introduce methods and consulting services, to enable enterprise users to correctly understand BPM concepts, enabling IT departments and enterprise users to jointly hold the responsibility of creating or improving process systems. As well, during inter-department cooperation, shifting responsibility should be strongly discouraged.

On another hand, for an SOA platform provider, BPEL is a common language to combine various services into new complex services. But since WSFL and XLANG were initially focused on process automation standards, the BPEL that is based on the two technologies often would ignore supporting Human Workflow. Therefore, BPEL has a direct effect of strengthening SOA execution, but while still emphasizing on a BPEL based BPM system. Such a system does not provide sufficient flexibility in organization and job assignment. Or to makeup for deficiencies of workflow, many add proprietary extensions to standard BPEL definitions, rendering the cross process engines feature useless.

When returning to the IT department management center. So should the next step be to deploy BPM to quickly respond to enterprise needs while closing the gap between IT supporting Business? Or should the IT architecture be consolidated to first create a flexible SOA environment? Actually from the development of both, deploying both of them in either order does not affect the future interrelation between the two. Most importantly, after an evaluation of enterprise goals, department goals, and differential complexity of the IT architecture, list ranking the more urgent problems can be created. This is where it should start.