Review Essay:
Wang Zhaohui
VICTORIA UNIVERSITY
School of Management & Information System
Lithan Hall Singapore Semester 3, 2010
Abstract. Today’s economies and commodity markets are rapidly changed. The
business process management also changed rapidly in order to increase the
business agility and optimize the costs. The combination of BPM and SOA
nowadays give successful enterprises in business agility. This paper review the
experiences in Danske Bank for using BPM combine with SOA. It is highlight the
successful application from business aspect and focus on the problems and
challenges over the IT department view as well as the lessons learned from the
experiences.
1. Introduction
BPM (Business Process Management) and SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) are two
IT concepts that have received almost unprecedented attention in the last few years (T.
Woodley & S. Gagnon, 2005). SOA and BPM are two divergent disciplines (Imran
Sarwar Bajwa et. al. 2008). SOA is a conceptual business architecture where business
functionality, or application logic, is made available to SOA users, or consumer, as
shared, reusable services on IT network.( Eric A. Marks & 2006). BPM is a blending of
process management/workflow with application integration technology to support rich
human interaction and deep application connectivity (Dave McCoy of the Gartner Group
said in 2001). The combination of SOA and BPM provide great business agility. There is
a Gartner survey of CIO in 2004 which indicated that 43 percent of IT investor interested
in business improvement and same among IT analysts believed that SOA is transforming
and enabling advancement in enterprise architecture (T. Woodley & S. Gagnon, 2005).
This paper review Steen Brahe’s report - BPM on Top of SOA: experiences from the
Financial Industry. In the article, Steen Brahe (2007) reported two major experiences of
using BPM and SOA together in Danske Bank for the pasted four years. Danske Bank is
one of the largest financial institutions in northern Europe. The author majorly use one
of the large project (Customer Package) as show the big business value of BPM
combined with SOA. The complexities and difficulties of adopting BPM and SOA also
mentioned from IT department view, as well as the challenges and lessons.
This paper first review the project development process in Danske Bank base on the life
cycle of BPM and SOA. The second section shows the result of the implementing of the
process and the value of business. The next section will discuss the problems, challenges
as well as the lessons in the experience. The last section will summary the future
perspective for the BPM and SOA.
Package process could automate most customer account creation. For about two years,
the process has systematically been improved and implemented to version 6.
faults. The business faults are errors returned from invoked services. The technical faults
may occur several places in the process. That made the faults handling more difficult and
more time consumable.
Steen Brahe also pointed that the developer should challenge the complexity of the
technology and evolution because the technologies to support SOA and BPM are still
evolution, they are changed rapidly and the new technology is not compatible with the
old one. There is much work to convert current workflow in order to fulfill with new
technology.
Steen Brahe had mentioned the lesson which learned from the experience in the project
of Customer Package in Danske Bank was the education and practice samples. He
mentioned that it was not easy to shift from traditional software development to service
orientation, the developer should taken sufficient education and best practice examples.
At least, the major person should be master the technology and understanding of the
business scenario in the project development life cycle. It would great reduce the
misunderstanding between the business management and user.
5. Summary
Form the Steen Brahe’s experiences in Danske Bank, it showed that the combination of
BPM and SOA together could gain successful business value for enterprise. In the past
many years, the topic of BPM and SOA became hot spot. There are many papers have
been describing successful experiences and challenges on adopting BPM and SOA.
Linus Chow et. al. (2007) presented a successful experience for an agile government
project. Zachay B. Wheeler & Roberta Bortolotti (2008) also reported another successful
project for DCRA( Department of Consumer and Regulatory Affairs, USA) with use
Web service to improve the business process flow. Those studies showed that BPM and
SOA together provide more benefit for business process. As BPM provides a wonderful
abstraction for building business systems, SOA provides the application platform to
bridges to the business processes and resources, and with the growth of business on the
Web, together BPM and SOA will master the next phase of business process evolution.
References