BPM and SOA 4

An interesting discussion this week with some of the top BPM people at IBM, on the nature of the relationship between BPM and SOA.

One of the critical elements of this relationship is the way the business case for BPM is connected with the business case for SOA. One of the ways to get the business interested in SOA is to promise BPM-related benefits.

But why do we need SOA to deliver BPM benefits? It may be technically possible to deliver many of these BPM benefits without using full SOA. Indeed, there may be people who claim to have produced similar benefits in the past, before SOA technology was available. So the business case for SOA in this context reduces to a technical argument about the greater efficiency or flexibility of SOA in delivering BPM benefits.

If an organization has a broken business process, which requires a single one-off effort to fix, then the case for using SOA is based on a simple comparison of two alternative development projects. But if an organization has a volatile business process, which requires constant modification, then the case for using SOA is based on an expectation of frequent modification. We would normally expect the business case for SOA to become stronger as the volatility increases.

We can use a simple spreadsheet model to compare costs and timescales and risks between two technical alternatives. We can produce graphs that show how the cost-benefit curve shifts as we vary the assumptions about volatility.

But the spreadsheet models, useful though they are, only tell half the story. The critical element of the business case is the architectural dependency between BPM and SOA. How much does BPM need SOA? In order to get the spreadsheet to calculate the synergy between BPM and SOA, we need to be able to quantify the architectural dependency - pick a number that is greater than zero and less than one.

But where does the number come from? There are three possibilities.

1. Guesswork. If you don't know any better, one number is as good as another.
   
2. Statistics. If you have a large quantity of historical data, you may be able to demonstrate some degree of correlation between SOA expenditure and BPM expenditure.
   
3. Algebraic reasoning. Infer the level of synergy from the structural characteristics of the architecture.

The business case as a whole is extremely sensitive to this number, and we need to develop better ways of determining it.

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