Kudos to Bruce Silver for an even-handed response to the "SOA vs. BPM" debate that's sure to capture some blog readers, but unfortunately does not clarify the issue for thoughtful people (see Christopher Koch at cio.com and Joe McKendrick at ZDNet [sidebar: when will we quit using military metaphors when we're talking about something like Services Oriented Architecture... this is not life-threatening stuff, guys]).

BPM is not SOA, but that doesn't mean they oppose one another. They are distinct yet complementary platforms that, used properly, can help everyone in IT and "the business."

The way I say it, SOA defines the way IT assets can be easily consumed by the business, and BPM defines their consumption. In Bruce's words, this is the "model-down" approach.

There's a lot of other things that the platforms do (think governance), but in essence, they provide the ability to better align interests by presenting purpose-built interfaces to their primary constituents (business and IT), providing more portability across that "line" while also serving the distinct managerial and leadership issues that the two communities properly have. As for IT, the benefits for the adoption (and promotion) of BPM are huge.

First, assuming the business gets involved in modeling, and goes down the BPM path, there will be absolute fidelity between what the business asks for and what they get. This is the benefit of model-based definition. It's also why the model as defined by the business is king (as opposed to a BPEL-based articulation, which is a part of the SOA infrastructure). Being able to share the model in a transportable format like BPDM - truly sharing the model - is important, too.

Second, by embracing BPM and a model-driven definition, IT is insured of a proper prioritization of services to provide. At Lombardi, we've run into situations where SOA-vendors led customers down the path of "service enabling" a ton of legacy systems, only to find out after building, say, "1,000 re-useable services" that only a few were needed by the business, that some that weren't built really were needed, and that changes to what was built - to align the service's outputs to the process need - were required. A lot of time and money was wasted.

Third, IT will benefit from a business that is more deeply involved in requirements gathering and solution definition using the collaborative BPM tools. This common set of tools, and language, will increase the "velocity of communication." Like increasing the velocity of money increases the overall money supply in an economy, increasing the velocity of communication between business and IT will increase the "solution supply." By promoting the use of BPM technology, solution delivery is no longer a zero-sum game.

As the business world evolves its use of technology and moves toward a more embedded model, IT will increasingly be responsible for the provision of steady-state services for the business to consume. Those companies that get to this new model quickest will be the winners this century. And SOA provides the basis for the exposure of these technology assets. This model requires the hand-in-hand deployment of a new type of technology - human-facing BPM technology - to complete the picture.

BPM is not SOA, but they're not competing interests. This is not a zero-sum game.

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