Bridging the gap between business and IT has always been, for the most part, a pipe dream for many a sponsor of SOA initiatives. According to the Business Ecology Initiative (BEI); whose purpose is to refocus such initiatives from a technology and data oriented perspective to one that is optimized for business benefits, processes, and roles; nurturing business driven IT, is the only way bridge this gap and create a business ecosystem.
The SOA Consortium, for which BEI is an umbrella organization, recently rebranded itself as the SOA/BPM Consortium, its clearly becoming apparent as to why SOA may be dead as we know it. There has been a lot written about BPM and SOA. It is clear that the two have their synergies, Not having the clearly defined best practices, roles, processes however, is one of the challenges BEI is trying and address. Bridging the gap between BPM and SOA for successful business driven IT,
SOA takes a technology-based approach to creating an architecture that supports the capturing of business processes and extending these for new capabilities while BPM takes a process management approach that may or may not include technology. Business and IT need to forge a closer relationship, so the new advocacy group will be focused on helping organizations combine the technically oriented aspects of SOA with the business focus of Business Process Management (BPM). Together they can create an environment that brings together the technology requirements (an architecture to support a service oriented approach to process) and the business management of these processes to support Business Ecology.
In a press release, Richard Mark Soley, executive director, SOA Consortium, recounts the history of the consortium and its mission and how the newly rebranded SOA consortium will act as a working group to impact the “business ecology”.
When the SOA Consortium began, SOA was more of a fringe methodology that only a few organizations were doing with any great success, rather than an accepted part of an overall business strategy. Three years later, we see corporations large and small using the principles of SOA to enhance their overall business and technology strategies, As we move forward in the drive towards Business Ecology, the combined BPM/SOA Consortium will continue to engage with the business community to show how SOA can be a valuable part of their business optimization efforts.
According an EbizQ article, the BPM/SOA Consortium includes Fortune 200 companies in Financial Services, Travel, Manufacturing, Retail and Telecommunications. Sponsors include Appian, IBM Corporation, MegaPractical and SPARX Systems, Inc. Participants include Fortune 1000 corporations, major government agencies and non-governmental organizations. For more information, please visit www.omg.org/consortiums.