As I am seeing lately, for most people…

SOA – lives in the Technology & related Services world

BPM – lives in the Business & related Process world

Why is it that when SOA / BPM were meant to bring about better alignment between Business & Technology, that exactly the opposite is being done?

In essence, Service Orientation & Process Orientation end up being one & the same thing.

Processes / Sub-Processes & Services / Composite Services are pretty much subsets, supersets & equal sets of each other depending purely on the viewpoint & the scope.

So, why all this brouhaha around SOA v/s BPM. Technology teams doing their own SOA initiatives & Business / Process folks doing their BPM initiatives. They want to work in their own worlds like they did before. It is surprising as well as shocking that the Goal of Alignment & Agility is really overshadowed by this bifurcation.

This confusion is because there is no clear understanding between what is a Service & a Process, how they overlap & how they inter-relate.

A Service is nothing but a process(s) & its information exposed in a specified manner.

For all practical purposes processes & services are pretty much the same thing, differing only in terms of viewpoint; for a service its usually from the point of a consumer.

A process is a means to service a given end.

So, what do we need to do about these SOA & BPM wars, and related initiatives.

One word that starts with ‘A’ – ALIGNMENT.

There is no GAP that needs to be bridged between SOA & BPM… unless one is created.

Now, if there exists an artificial gap between the two initiatives, it is one of perspective.

All Processes & Services do nothing but read & write information between People & Machines.

The manner in which a process services the information between the right people & the right machines as per its goal defined the life, scope & behavior of that process / service.

 So, how do we bring Alignment?