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The Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) is the dominant architectural style for packaging, distributing and invoking discrete functions today. SOA helps IT groups better deliver on the changing needs of the business and companies investing in SOA typically expect to get better flexibility, agility and re-use from their SOA investments. For a business person, the chief value of a SOA is that it removes the need to understand the complex application infrastructure of the company today.

Adopting SOA as an architectural style does not ensure that a company will realize competitive advantage in their business because its focus is on the technology of the business. Its goal is to unlock value from existing systems and simplify how information and discrete functions are accessed by the business - but it does not describe the business itself. The tools needed for service implementation and management are different that the tools needed for true process improvement. IT groups must have a plan for linking SOA to business imperatives.

BPM Opportunity

For this reason, leading companies investing in SOA are now implementing BPM platforms to deliver process improvement capabilities to the hands of business users. They recognize that the most important difference in BPM is its business-orientation — and that is why they are adding BPM to their tools and architecture. With BPM, these companies are realizing the following benefits:

  • Deploy and realize ROI today. BPM drives quick deployment wins with real ROI that can justify service development and use.
  • Provide real-time process control. Give managers real-time insight into process bottlenecks and the ability to adjust thresholds to improve performance.
  • Enable collaborative solution development. A collaborative design environment facilitates shared understanding of process requirements across business and IT users — a critical element of deployment success.
  • Orchestrate resolution to business events — not just notification. Model and execute processes that detect business events and orchestrate resolution involving humans, systems and other events.
  • Services Prioritization. BPM creates real-world application requirements for service development which ensures you are building the right services for the business.

Lombardi In Action

A leading provider of secondary insurance in the US wished to transform its billing operations by streamlining its processes and making systems more accessible and well-coordinated. By approaching SOA and BPM together, they were able to achieve ROI with better technical architecture and integration speed. This resulted in reducing the invoice reconciliation backlog from 4 days to under 24 hours while decreasing error rates and achieving millions of dollars in ROI. That project drove SOA service development and continues to expand to take advantage of new services as they are built.