Businesses, all around the world, constantly demand improved agility and superior customer service, while driving down the operational costs. This is especially pertinent in case of Banks, Financial Service Providers, and Insurance companies.

With rapid computerisation, businesses have been able to automate the processing and cut down on customer servicing time. They have adopted and leveraged technologies such as Business Process Management (BPM) to enable end-to-end, enterprise-wide automation of their business processes, and achieved unmatched, all-round benefits. BPM weaves all the activities of an enterprise as part of well-defined set of business processes. In other words, BPM enables efficient management and orchestration of myriad business processes running across departments, systems, people, and business units.

In a global economy being increasingly dominated by the Internet, business processes have already crossed the enterprise boundary; a process might start in one country and culminate in a different country. BPM, through Web-enabled solutions, has enabled organisations to go beyond the traditional boundaries and become truly global.

However, the constant need to cut costs, quickly develop and deploy solutions, and reduce customer-service time has resulted in evolution of technologies such as Service Oriented Architecture (SOA).

SOA focuses on developing reusable services that can be used across various business functions. These services may be regarded as components implementing a particular functionality, which is part of a business process. The components may be developed using any technology or language, but can be easily used by multiple disparate systems through a loosely coupled interface. This is in sharp contrast to the prevalent approach of building application silos where it is extremely hard to incorporate changes in tightly integrated applications and technologies.

BPM and SOA present themselves as a disruptive technology platform, using which organisations can develop an ecosystem fostering coherent synergies among the various lines of business and offer best-of-breed services.

Challenges Before Businesses

A perennial challenge for enterprises today is integrating and interfacing new solutions with legacy applications. These applications use different technologies and platforms, and tight couplings exist between the Process/BPM layer-Application layer and Application Layer-Technology layer. Such tight couplings mean that even a slight change in any layers has a cascading effect in other layers. Managing tight couplings and integrations under the environment, which constantly mandates changes in business processes, besets the organisations with bloated operational costs, increased time to restore services, and risk of loss of business.

Without SOA in place, organisations need to develop and implement specific solutions for individual businesses. In due course, this results in a huge ecosystem consisting of multiple applications, technologies and platforms. Therefore, the organisations not only incur repetitive costs for building as-and-when-needed solutions, but must also invest for constant maintenance and support, which can be a huge drain on the company resources.

In addition, SOA-based Web Services can be developed independently of applications by third-party vendors. Web Services can be developed using any preferred language and are platform independent. Businesses can get multiple services developed in parallel through multiple vendors, and assured super-quick, smooth integration and deployment into existing enterprise ecosystem.

BPM-SOA Combine: The New Business Mantra

While SOA may be considered dealing more with low-level, technical implementation of the service functionality, BPM may be considered more focused on defining business needs. However, SOA has evolved primarily due to business needs rather than technology requirements. Within an enterprise, a business process may also be regarded as a set of a number of services. BPM is the consumer of the services offered by services exposed using SOA. Using BPM, the business user could design a specific task accomplished through a set of one or more services, offered by SOA. The business user need not be aware of integration and implementation details of such service(s). Service registry and service discovery facilities enable dynamic access of services.

Business Benefits

The use of BPM to implement the SOA strategy enables extending an enterprise’s ability to quickly develop and offer new products by leveraging the underlying set of common components/services, achieve economies of scale and speed up process automation, in addition to several other benefits. In this way, complementing each other, BPM and SOA can provide much-sought-after business agility and flexibility.

BPM can be thought of as backbone for SOA-based services of an organisation. As BPM provides extensive tracking, monitoring, reporting and analysis facilities, the deployed services could be easily measured for performance and optimised.

BPM-SOA combination can be leveraged to design and implement truly end-to-end automated solutions, built by using existing functionalities, resulting into huge costs savings and decreased time to market. Businesses can fully exploit the combined capabilities of BPM and SOA to quickly scale the solutions to higher transaction demands. The combine offers effective multiple-channel integration capabilities in a heterogeneous ecosystem where organisations operate in multiple lines of businesses.

Another problem is to constantly comply with ever-changing regulations, which could be a nightmare for a huge organisation running multiple siloed applications, dealing with repetitive and redundant data. BPM and SOA help organisations develop a coherent, integrated ecosystem of applications, and facilitate easy compliance to regulatory norms.

BPM and SOA both offer comprehensive capabilities that make a strong case for their adoption, even individually. However, combined together, they offer pervasive, unbeatable benefits to enterprises looking to catapult themselves ahead of the others.

The author is Managing Director, Newgen Software