News

Survey claims growing bond between SOA and BPM

Posted by Jean-Jacques Dubray on Sep 11, 2007 09:30 AM

Community: SOA
Topics: SOA Appliance ,; Business Process Management ,; SOA Platforms
Tags: webMethods

Paul Harmon and Celia Wolf, editors of BPTrends.com, published last week the results of a survey* on the relationship between SOA and BPM.

The questions were answered by the 350 BPTrends readers coming from a mix of industries, company sizes, geographical locations and roles.

Most readers think that BPM and SOA complement each other and should be integrated. Only a few (7%), however, think that SOA is essential for a successful BPM project.

The survey shows that Europe is ahead of North America when it comes to BPMS implementations (78% against 55% of the respondents). These results are consistant with the Aberdeen report published last spring showing that 50% of the respondends in north america were turning to BPM in 2007.

The survey also probed the importance of SOA governance in relation to Business Process Management:

More interesting is the differing emphasis on SOA Governance between respondents from Europe and North America. Europeans are much more likely to see SOA Governance as important or very important, while respondents from North America are much less likely to see SOA Governance as important or very important.

The survey displays the intersection between the SOA maturity model and the BPM maturity model which shows that both BPM and SOA initiatives usually start and evolve independently until an advanced stage where the capabilities are combined. Back in April, BPTrends published an article from Inaganti and Sriram which detailed a sophisticated SOA Maturity Model, including BPMS capabilities.

The survey shows that:

companies are increasingly aware of the relationship between SOA and BPMS and are beginning to demand tools that combine the two technologies... [and] significantly, the leading BPMS vendors are some of the leaders in combining SOA and BPM.

(*) The survey was sponsored by webMethods/Software A.G. and requires registration.