SOA strategy and execution is failing in many companies

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: 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.

I heard a technical architect suggest three 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. It gives many businesses an approach that balances the architectural benefits of SOA against the cultural shift that business people are demanding.

The management philosophy of BPM empowers business people to think about the processes that affect their day-to-day lives and operations. It gives them a new role in defining requirements, on their terms, and creates a common language for business and IT to address real implementation level concerns. 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% felt that BPM was an important part of that strategy. To sum up, SOA is SOL without BPM.