There seems to be a silly chasm developing between the SOA guys and the business process management guys (BPM), as pointed out by ZD blogger Joe McKendrick.

"Now, this ongoing process war is aligning behind two technology concepts — BPM and SOA, Koch says. The BPM folks come from the business side, and the SOA folks come from the technology side. However, he holds out new hope, but emphatically states that SOA (and the technology side) have the best chances of driving real change in the business at this point"

I can see it now, two gangs on either side of the dark street, one with black leather jackets with "West Side SOA" embroidered on the back, and the other gang wearing tank tops with process symbol tattoos all down their arms and legs, both tossing boxes of enterprise software at each other.

I do think there is a bit of "acronym envy" on the part of the BPM guys, now that SOA is getting all of the headlines and they have been off in dark rooms drawing lines and boxes for the last decade, or more. However, there is more synergy here than either camp understands right now, albeit I've been writing about it for 10 years now.

Truth-be-told the discipline of BPM is really a part of everything having to do with integration, including EAI, B2B, and yes SOA. SOA’s ultimate goal is to provide abstraction layers that works with a business process (or orchestration) layer, allowing those who want to change processes to do so at that layer, and have the changes reflect back on the underlying information flows and service invocations. Thus, they are linked, so stop trying to spin them a separate disciplines, perhaps attend each other’s conferences, and learn what each side has to offer.

Posted by Dave Linthicum on June 12, 2006 10:10 AM