Today's business environment is changing rapidly. Business dynamics and technological innovations have left organizations with a disparate mix of operating systems, applications, and databases - making it difficult, time consuming, and costly for IT departments to deliver new applications that integrate heterogeneous technologies. The key to success in the networked economy is not only being able to create business processes to automate value chains, but also being able to modify these processes as business requirements change. Innovation in enterprise architecture will come from service-oriented architecture (SOA) and business process management (BPM).

Enterprises must rethink their IT infrastructure and begin to implement an SOA and BPM. The combination of BPM and an SOA are crucial steps towards becoming a real-time enterprise, thus creating the foundation to respond faster to changing business requirements and to react to events in real time. Advances in Web services technology and standards are critical driving forces that will take SOA and BPM to mainstream adoption.

This article examines concepts of SOA and BPM, evaluates the benefits of these concepts individually, and articulates expectations for them. Further, it proposes and explains the SOA-BPM framework and its components. Finally this article makes a case about synergy between SOA and BPM and how each one can enhance the returns of the other.

Until now, SOAs have only been implemented by a few leading-edge enterprises due to high costs and the level of technical skill required; however, Web services are now making it both affordable and possible from a skills point of view. In addition, the consolidation of security technologies and maturing standards for Web services means security is no longer a stumbling block. This will accelerate the spread of SOA and make it mainstream. Web services used to be a solution looking for a problem. With SOA, it has finally found it.

BPM improves process design and integration, thereby making application systems work more efficiently together. It delivers tactical cost/time benefits, while building a base for competitive growth. Regulatory compliances such as Sarbanes-Oxley or Basel 2 are additional drivers for BPM, as they require the monitoring of critical business processes and the ability to report abnormal situations in the processes themselves.

SOA allows companies to reuse existing applications and data to create new business processes. It makes the enterprise more agile and less locked-in to certain ways of doing business, as applications can be changed faster and more easily. The impending risk of standard fragmentation will make it more complex for enterprises to reap the full benefits of SOA and BPM during the next three years. However, enterprises must invest now to create the skills and governance processes necessary to leverage SOA and BPM for business advantage.

Enterprises have traditionally implemented separate solutions for operating legacy and packaged applications, business-to-business (B2B) interactions, collaboration, and general-purpose distributed computing. Moreover, IT professionals also need to plan for unforeseen and changing dynamics created by mergers and acquisitions, new partnerships, expansion, and new customer requirements. This creates a serious bottleneck in the ability to manage, change, and modify enterprise processes to dynamically match changes in requirements.

The key to success in the networked economy is the ability to create and modify processes to automate value chains in concert with changing requirements. Faster change management will help enterprises integrate their processes over the Internet so they can achieve greater efficiency, generate more revenue, and enter new markets.

A new category of enterprise infrastructure solutions, built on an SOA, will deliver these benefits. SOAs are based on the notion of services, which are high-level software components that include Web services. Implementation of an SOA requires tools as well as run-time infrastructure software, which we collectively refer to as an SOA implementation framework (SOAIF). An SOAIF includes both design-time and run-time capabilities, as well as all of the software functionality that an enterprise requires to build and operate an SOA, including service-oriented:

• Tools
• Management
• Integration
• Processes

SOAIFs address the needs of process management at the application, human-interaction, and implementation levels. The SOAIF addresses these needs within and across enterprises and across multiple domains, including EAI, B2B integration, BPM, collaboration, and even network management; each area is traditionally served by distinct solutions. BPM is a very important and vital part of enterprise SOA implementation.

What Is Business Process Management?
BPM is the practice of improving the efficiency and effectiveness of any organization by automating the organization's business processes. Some key issues of BPM worth noting are as follows.

• Many companies have business processes that are unique to their business models. Since these processes tend to evolve over time as the business reacts to market conditions, the BPM solution you choose must be easily adaptable to the new conditions and requirements and continue to be a perfect fit for the company.
• In order to use BPM effectively, organizations must stop focusing exclusively on data and data management, and adopt a process-oriented approach that makes no distinction between work done by a human and work done by a computer.
• The idea of BPM is to bring processes, people, and information together.
• Identifying the business processes is relatively easy. Breaking down the barriers between business areas, and finding owners for the processes, is difficult.
• BPM not only involves managing business processes within the enterprise; it also involves the real-time integration of the processes of a company with those of its suppliers, business partners, and customers.
• BPM involves looking at automation horizontally instead of vertically.

• BPM Integrated Design Environment. BPM IDE is an integrated design environment used to design processes, rules, events, and exceptions. Creating a structured definition of each process is very important to any business, and the IDE enables a business user to design all of processes without any help from IT.
• Process Engine. The process engine of a BPM solution keeps track of the states and variables for all of the active processes. Within a complex system, there could be thousands of processes with interlocking records and data.
• User Directory. Administrators define people in the system by name, department, role, and even by potential authority level. This directory will enable tasks to be sent automatically to the defined resources.
• Workflow. This is the communication infrastructure that forwards tasks to the appropriate individual.
• Reporting/Process Monitoring. Enables users to track the performance of their current processes and the performance of personnel who are executing these processes.
• Integration. Enterprise application integration (EAI) and/or Web services are critical to BPM, as business processes will require data from disparate systems throughout the organization.