BUSINESS-IT ALIGNMENT AND ORGANISATION AGILITY
ENABLED BY BPM AND SOA APPROACHES INTERPLAY
Youness Lemrabet, Hui Liu, Nordine Benkeltoum, Michel Bigand and Jean-Pierre Bourey
Université Lille Nord de France, F-59000 Lille, France
LM²O, Ecole Centrale de Lille, BP48 59651 Villeneuve d'Ascq cedex, France
Keywords: BPM, SOA, Business process, Business service, Business-IT alignment.
Abstract: Business Process Management (BPM) and Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) approaches receive
considerable attention from scholars and industrial practitioners. Thanks to the three streams of the EMT
model (Economy, Methodology, Technology) this paper shows that BPM and SOA approaches are two
sides of the same coin, which are different but complementary. This combination enables organisations to
improve their agility in the face of uncertainty, complexity and change.
1 INTRODUCTION
Global acceleration of exchanges in goods and
services requires organisations to adopt an open
view beyond their own boundaries at both business
and technological levels. Contingency theorists
have, for a long time, emphasized the fact that there
is a reciprocal structuring between an organisation
and its environment (Burns and Stalker, 1971). More
recently, studies have shown that contemporary
organisations increasingly collaborate with their
partners (Segrestin, 2006). This cooperation is
especially motivated by knowledge and research
acquisition. Indeed, open organisations can be more
responsive to environment changes and they can
identify the needs and expectations of their partners.
The contemporary changes are so fast that the
reactivity is already a key success factor in today's
economy, especially in the immaterial industries.
The new requirements of uncertain and rapid
changes cause continuous synchronization efforts to
assimilate business changes. To face challenges,
organisations have invested heavily in methods,
architecture frameworks and technological
infrastructures to become more agile and flexible.
Information technologies have traditionally been
seen as mere cost centre for doing business
(Korhonen et al., 2010). However, with the wide use
of IT (Information Technology) infrastructures at the
operational levels , the focus has been shifted to
more strategic use of IT (Bigand et al., 2004).
Business and IT alignment issues have been
discussed for almost two decades (Luftman et al.,
1993), but they are still considered to be of high
importance (Luftman et al., 2009). However, the
implementation of such alignment has many
difficulties (Avison et al., 2004).
Traditional organisation according to functions
in separate silos, each optimized for a particular line
of business, is not effective. It neither allows
business-IT alignment, nor improves business
agility. By combining Business Process
Management (BPM) and Service Oriented
Architecture (SOA) approaches, this article
highlights the key factors to align business and IT by
allowing organisations to cross functional
boundaries seamlessly. This paper is not a case study
but a formalization of feedback from the ASICOM
project. This project, labelled by the two
competitiveness poles: PICOM and Nov@log aims
at making enterprises - especially small and medium
enterprises (SMEs) in both trade and logistics
sectors - benefit from the interoperable solutions
which use simplified exchanges in supply chains,
and primarily with Customs departments (Lemrabet
et al., 2010).
The next section provides the current state-of-
the-art for BPM and SOA. Then, the third part
highlights the synergies between SOA and BPM and
proposes the EMT model (Economics, Methodology
and Technology). This model takes into account
economic, technological and methodological aspects
which advocate the implementation of BPM and
241
Lemrabet Y., Liu H., Benkeltoum N., Bigand M. and Bourey J..
BUSINESS-IT ALIGNMENT AND ORGANISATION AGILITY ENABLED BY BPM AND SOA APPROACHES INTERPLAY.
DOI: 10.5220/0003494802410246
In Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems (ICEIS-2011), pages 241-246
ISBN: 978-989-8425-55-3
Copyright
c
2011 SCITEPRESS (Science and Technology Publications, Lda.)
SOA to improve business agility. The fourth section
proposes a framework which contains six elements
required during the implementation of BPM and
SOA approaches. Finally, the conclusion
summarizes the main findings and provides an
outlook of further research.
2 BPM AND SOA: STATE OF ART
2.1 Business Process Management
BPM is a management discipline focusing on
business process to improve agility and operational
performances. It improves processes in terms of
final users’ needs: for example, reducing the process
execution time.
BPM is supported by tools, methods and good
practises that let to manage business activities from
a process perspective. BPM is mostly often
associated with life cycles of business processes and
it aims to manage processes and activities of
organisations in a continuous improvement cycle.
BPM approach can be used without IT contribution
(Zairi, 1997).
Historically, the advance of business process
management can be classified along four major
stages. The first stage began in 1920, when non-
automated processes were introduced in working
practises. The second between 60’s and 90’s with
the emergence of IS, business processes were
supported by batch processing systems, no explicit
BPM supported by information systems. Later in the
90’s of last century, the emergence of enterprise
integration approaches and methodologies promotes
intra-organisational business processes. Workflows
were then widely used to integrate internal business
processes. Nowadays globalization and rapid
evolution of market opportunities drive the third
stage of BPM. This stage is characterized with
collaborations supported by expanded business
processes which include all partners (suppliers,
business partners, clients, administrations, etc) as
well as systems and resources. BPM contains three
distinct but related blocks: a management discipline,
a technology platform and a new implementation
style for building automated process solution (Silver,
2010).
BPM as Management Discipline
In the 80s, Rummler advised enterprises to adopt a
customer-centric end-to-end process perspective.
Later he formalized this new management discipline
in his book: Improving Performance: (Rummler and
Brache, 1990). Modelling business process across
functional and organisational boundaries is a
fundamental element in BPM (Figure 1).
Figure 1: Business processes’ example.
Process model is one kind of models needed to
improve organisational performances and tools like
Business Process Analysis (BPA) allow to manage
several models that are specifically used for
modelling business processes and information
related to the processes.
BPM as Technology Platform
Many aspects must be taken into account to improve
business process performance without IT concerns
like removing non-value-added tasks. Nonetheless,
today it is difficult to undertake a business design
project without IT. Process improvement project
benefits are much greater with today’s techniques
and technologies. Business Process Management
Suites (BPMS) is an integrated package of tools and
platforms that enable a continuous improvement
cycle of business processes.
BPM as Implementation Style
Improving business agility requires more direct and
prominent business roles in process improvement
projects. BPM advocates and allows a new agile and
iterative style - within short-cycles - in which
business and IT collaborate using a common process
model. BPMS architecture is adopted to support
continuous change in business processes.
2.2 Service Oriented Architecture
SOA approach was proposed by Gartner in 1996
(Schulte and Natis, 1996). SOA means different
things to different audiences, but from a business
perspective SOA is a way of organizing and
understanding organisations, communities and
systems to maximize organisation agility and to
achieve economies scale. Thus, it is also regarded as
an architectural approach, guideline ro patterns to
realize a system by combining a set of existent
services. According to (Amsden, 2010), “to achieve
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its potential, an SOA-based IT infrastructure needs
to be business-relevant, thus driven by business and
implemented to support business”.
SOA utilizes services as fundamental elements to
develop applications. Not only Service is considered
as a construction unit of system, but also each
service is reusable, shared and loosely-coupled with
the other services.SOA is technology independent. It
means that the choice of technologies and tools is
secondary. Various technologies implement SOA
(Marks and Bell, 2006). Thereby, the core objective
of an organisation using SOA approach is to
rationalize its business. With SOA organisations use
Information System (IS) at strategic level, which
becomes then a real partner of functional
management. SOA helps breaking down
organisation silos by providing reusable services that
support business process improvement, and enable a
seamless IT evolution.
From the technical perspective SOA services can
be considered as “functions” that are accessible
across a network via well-defined interfaces.
Technologies like web services can be used to
implement logical services.
3 EMT MODEL TO
RATIONALIZE THE BPM-SOA
SYNERGY
3.1 BPM and SOA Rivalry or Synergy?
BPM and SOA approaches are different: the former
is a business driven initiative and the latter is an IT
driven initiative. But several research activities show
that BPM and SOA are, together, two
complementary approaches. SOA allows discovering
a collection of reusable services and to orchestrate
them to build a dynamic business processes. The
BPM-SOA partnership can realize iterative design
and optimisation of processes based on reusable
services that can be changed swiftly. This
combination creates opportunities by making
organisation processes visible and by helping to
develop a flexible IT infrastructure. However,
according to several authors, it is not as
straightforward to achieve synergy between BPM
and SOA aligning these two concepts requires a
deep transformation of organisations to align the two
concepts (Hiemstra et al., 2009).
SOA promotes consolidation of redundant
operations and improves organisation ability to
adapt to business environment change; business
services remain relatively stable over time. It
provides reusable services but without any business
agility warranty (Bajwa et al., 2009). As business
processes are driven by customer’s requirements,
they enable organisations to respond rapidly to
changes in order to ensure its agility. But BPM does
not provide a fine-granular unit to build a system.
Figure 2 is inspired by Cummins (2009).
Figure 2: Impact of BPM and SOA in organisation
architecture.
SOA is designed as a composition of services;
each service provides a capability in respond to a
request from another service and uses other services’
capabilities. This combination of capabilities allows
organisations to provide services at a lower cost and
to improve quality of services (Cummins, 2010).
Organisations then become an aggregation of
reusable capabilities used in different business
contexts. While BPM helps to break down the
functional silos in organisations and to unify
organisation around critical information such as
customer needs.
To understand the BPM-SOA synergy, the
following question remains: what is a business
process in SOA? Two different visions exist. The
first is usually used in SOA technical approaches
and it positions business processes over business
services. The second explains that a business process
that invokes a business service belongs to another
business service (Cummins, 2010).
Figure 3: Business process and business service.
Figure 3 illustrates our view on this relationship.
The Services Architecture A accepts two requests.
Each one invokes different business processes X and
Y. The process X delegates some of its
BUSINESS-IT ALIGNMENT AND ORGANISATION AGILITY ENABLED BY BPM AND SOA APPROACHES
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243
responsibilities to business service T. Both processes
X and Y provide respectively different capabilities
but they share the same capability (the sub-process
Z). Business processes can also invoke different
capabilities: human tasks, applications other
business services.
3.2 EMT Model
We propose to use EMT model which uses three
work streams (Economy, Methodology,
Technology) to describe how BPM and SOA
interplay can help to develop a cross-functional and
customer-focused business process that achieves
strategic business objectives (see Figure 4).
Figure 4: EMT model.
3.2.1 Economic Domain
A recent survey (Gartner, 2010) addresses the
following question: what are the strategies behind
the 2010 CIO Agenda and how will CIOs meet the
competing requirements placed on IT? This survey
confirms CIO’s interest in BPM, with CIO’s
continued focus on business process improvement,
cost reduction and analysis.
Together, BPM and SOA provide a good
combination for enterprise computing (Bajwa et al.,
2009), and (Frye, 2006) estimates that “BPM and
SOA are two sides of the same coin”. BPM is a good
reason to deploy SOA infrastructure. SOA
infrastructure does not deliver a direct value to the
end-user. Without BPM, SOA can only improve the
ROI (return on investment) of IT. It is the business
process use and benefit from the reusable and loose
coupling services that support the ROI resulting
from business process improvement.
3.2.2 Methodological Domain
There are several ways to improve processes, top-
down or bottom-up, one time or continuous, radical
or incremental. The choice of improvement ways
depends on organisations strategy. But in BPM (like
in Six Sigma) the most recommended form of
process improvements are participative, incremental,
and continuous (Hammer, 2010). It is also
recommended to use a top-down approach to
identify business processes from business
requirements and objectives. There is no guarantee
that business process requirement will be realized if
the requirements are defined from an IT point of
view (Gulledge, 2010). However, in SOA both top-
down or bottom-up methods provide a unified
conceptual unit of work: business service (Catts and
St. Clair, 2009). Business services allow IT and
business to work together and give each of them a
visibility on the other domain. From business
perspective, business and BPM experts use BPM
tools to identify and create business processes. Then,
they refine them to get a set of elementary business
services. From IT perspective, developers focus
firstly on existing capabilities and transform them
into basic services. Then, they aggregate the services
to design more sophisticated service until
discovering required business services.
3.2.3 Technological Domain
We think that process reengineering is only efficient
if information flows are supported by information
systems that are aligned with new processes
(Gulledge, 2010).
One of SOA promises is to emphasize using IT
to automate business processes. Business processes
are supported by business services which can be
invoked through Internet using standards.
Information exchange among partners is then
realized by network communication and loose
coupling between providers and consumers allows
them to use different technologies. SOA-based IT
technologies such as Web services or Enterprise
Service Bus (ESB) can be used to integrate services.
It is difficult to improve business processes when
they are embedded and hidden in organisation
applications. BPM enabled by SOA addresses the
above issue by dissociating business requirements
and logics defined in business processes from
technological infrastructures. Then business
processes can be implemented by composing
services into Service Oriented Business Applications
(SOBAs). BPMS can then be used to model,
execute, manage, and optimize SOBAs. In SOABs
integration occurs at business process activities
through integration of business activities. Business
integration is realized with the help of well defined
service interfaces which make associated business
processes accessible to other services. Then, service
reusability becomes the central topic rather than
application integration.
While technology is far from being sufficient to
automate business processes, it is a necessary
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component that underlies any architectural approach.
Business requirements must drive any choice for IT
components. The choice has to facilitate
organisations to take advantage of their legacy
systems.
Figure 5: IT building blocks of BPM SOA architecture.
Figure 5 gives an overview of some technologies
that support business processes and organisation
capabilities. It depicts the relationship between
different IT architectural levels. Some major
platform vendors like IBM and Oracle are providing
products at the four levels in Figure 5, while in the
open-source offering no global solution is proposed.
Other mid-tier vendors are providing product limited
in scope and scale.
We assert that each organisation has to use the
software which narrows the gap between the
business requirements described with BPA tools
(level 1) and its resources (level 4) provided through
SOA infrastructures.
4 REFERENCE FRAMEWORK
FOR BPM-SOA ALIGNEMENT
We propose a framework to gain a sound
understanding of business-IT alignment problem
based on BPM and SOA approaches. In the
framework six work streams are identified to
decompose complexity of this problem and to
highlight essential building blocks. These relevant
elements address a holistic understanding and
consistency of BPM and SOA and identify critical
success factors in the implementation of BPM and
SOA approaches.
Business Strategic Alignment
Strategic alignment with Information Systems takes
place in organisations when goals are in harmony
with business processes and systems that support
them. When organisations define or modify business
strategies, it means that existent business strategies
require change. To identify new business
capabilities, strategic and operational elements
organisations have to combine knowledge,
organisation, process and technology. These
capabilities are then used to identify future business
processes. BPM and SOA approaches need to be
aligned with an overall strategy of organisations
(Catts and St. Clair, 2009).
Human capital and Organizational Culture
Success of BPM and SOA initiatives depends on
human factors. In this field there are two important
dimensions: (a) people’s knowledge and skills to
improve business performance (human capital) and
(b) leadership in a facilitating environment to
complement the BPM and SOA initiatives (culture).
BPM Governance
Moving to BPM requires a set of governance
mechanisms to define the appropriate roles,
responsibilities, and decisions making. BPM
governance determines who is responsible for
making decisions, what decisions to make, and
following which policies for making decisions. Two
dimensions of BPM governance can be
differentiated: (a) governance of process, and (b)
governance of process management itself. The
former dimension observes the various mechanisms
to design a cost-effective governance structure
(Markus and Jacobson, 2010), while the latter
examines management practises of BPM governance
(Spanyi, 2010).
Business Process
This work stream deals with areas that reect the
process lifecycle stages like design, analysis,
implementation, execution, monitoring, and
improvement. It also includes definitions of business
process performance measurements: Key
Performance Indicators (KPI), and metrics.
SOA and IT Technology
This work stream concerns IT environment and SOA
solutions and architectures to support business
processes.
SOA and IT Governance
SOA governance is a specialization of IT
governance within the context of business processes
and the life cycle of services. The lifecycle
management is the key goal of SOA governance.
5 CONCLUSIONS
This article has presented an overview of BPM and
SOA approaches, as well as the interplay between
them from academics and practitioners points of
view. Different aspects of the two approaches are
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245
introduced, especially from our vision about the
relationship between business processes and
business services.
We have put forth, the EMT model (Economy,
Methodology and Technology) to show that SOA
and BPM are two complementary approaches that
bring a new way for achieving economies of scale
and organisation agility. They support together a
complete business-IT alignment from business
requirements to executable business processes. We
have also proposed a brief overview of a framework
composed of six core elements; each element
represents a key success factor for implementing
BPM and SOA.
Currently, there is a little research about
achieving a BPM-SOA synergy. There is a need for
further studies to understand the relationship
between SOA and BPM and the benefit of their
combination. Another area for future investigation is
to formalize the applicability of these approaches in
the context of SMEs using the reference framework
proposed in this paper and from our experience in
the ASICOM project.
To formalize SOA and BPM relationships
advanced in this paper a methodology must be
developed, documented, implemented, and
validated. This methodology will guides the
evolution at the operational level of business-IT
alignment using BPM and SOA approaches to obtain
a better aligned situation.
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