Friday, 16 November 2007

‘IT’ Viewed as Critical to Business Process, SOA Emerging as Key Enabler

IT needs to play a ‘critical’ role in supporting process management initiatives but is still a far cry away from fully satisfying this mandate.

This was the gist of the result that was presented from a recent report, “Business Process Management and Service-Oriented Architecture”, which was produced by BPTrends, a leading source of business intelligence for business process change and was sponsored by Software AG.

Among overall respondents, 25 percent suggested that other enterprise priorities were undermining these efforts and 17 percent believed that technology limitations have prevented IT from playing a more critical role.

The study also found increasing recognition for the role that service-oriented architecture (SOA) plays as an enabler of BPM success. Forty percent of respondents agreed that “BPM is more successful and drives more benefits when deployed in an SOA environment”.

When asked about SOA governance specifically, 53 precent described it as ‘important’ or ‘very important’ to their BPM initiatives with an additional 19 percent describing it as ‘somewhat important’. Despite this enthusiasm, adoption remains nascent as only 20 percent reported that they are using SOA and BPM together on projects despite the fact that 90 percent of these respondents indicated that they currently have SOA and/or BPM initiatives underway.

“While some confusion still exists to the ‘real’ meaning of BPM, the market has matured considerably over the past year,” said Paul Harmon, Executive Editor and Founder of BPTrends, and co-author of the study.

“Organizations are adopting BPM as an enterprise discipline and strategy and have taken tentative steps towards embracing SOA as a key enabler. However, work remains to be done as most enterprises have yet to fully grasp the strong and constructive interrelationship between BPM and SOA.”

The survey also found an increase in the number of enterprises that have gone beyond Modeling, Analysis and Design (MAD) products to embrace more broadly-focused business process management software suites (BPMS) to automate and more actively manage their business processes.

“The old wall that has separated IT from the lines of business continues to crumble,” said Bruce Williams, senior vice president and General Manager for BPM Solutions, Software AG.

“This is clearly an industry in transition, where business methodologies and philosophies are being wedded to a new generation of more adaptive and flexible enterprise tools and infrastructure. Those that take full advantage of IT’s emerging ability to accelerate business change in today’s economy are most likely to be the market leaders of tomorrow.”

The survey was conducted in June 2007 with respondents drawn from BPTrends’ global membership base. Roughly half of the 348 respondents currently use BPM software tools. Respondents included business analysts and process architects, IT users and end-users and line-of-business executives.