Business in today’s globalized world is of a collaborative nature. Successful business ventures of the modern era require strategic alliances to leverage capabilities. Information technology or IT is rapidly changing from being just a facilitator to an important driver of business.
Change from Early Disparate Software Systems to One Stop ERP Solutions
Earlier IT systems used large mainframe computers and were rigid solutions to address particular business needs. These systems were disparate and lacked mechanisms to inter communicate. In the late 1990’s Enterprise Resource Planning or ERP systems promised to provide most if not all of a company’s information needs. These ERP packages such as Oracle Financials, PeopleSoft and SAP still are predominant though inherent challenges exist in their flexibility and inter communication. Complex and expensive middleware systems are required to integrate different ERP systems.
Need for Integration and Workflow Methodology
This challenge in integration of ERP solutions led to the development of EAI or Enterprise Application Integration software. These are typically messaging software and message brokers. But it is still time consuming to write application adapters which are used to inter connect ERP systems. Workflow systems also emerged in parallel which implemented document management and form based information processing. But these were incomplete solutions to implement a complete business process.
Service Oriented Architecture and Business Process Management
Thus evolved the philosophy of a service oriented architecture or SOA. This is an architectural approach that builds systems from a bottom-up method and is loosely coupled for greater flexibility. The latest trend in providing business solutions is Business Process Management or BPM. BPM’s approach is to integrate business and IT thus taking control of business processes in an end to end manner. BPM is a process oriented top-down methodology for providing software solutions to business processes. The BPM life cycle can be categorized as:
Discovery: Understanding the clients business process called As-is process to get a clear idea of customers, suppliers, vendors and other stakeholders and also the system activities.
Design: This includes modeling the improved to-be process and simulating the new process for optimal performance when run in a business environment.
Deployment and Execution: Rolling out the complete solution across all stakeholders involved in an easy to deploy manner without programming
Operation and Maintenance: Change management including addition of sub processes or alterations in stakeholders involved with relative ease and resolution of exceptions leading to improved robustness of solution.
Optimization and Analysis: Improvement in technical or process performance by analyzing data provided by BPM software.
Convergence of SOA and BPM
Industry experts believe that the future is going to be driven by a converging phenomenon of BPM and SOA. The differences of SOA and BPM are complimentary and both can be applied together in a mutually beneficial manner. Standalone BPM solutions will be empowered with the flexibility of SOA’s integration capabilities. Thus business solutions will be driven by BPM loosely coupled with an SOA layer which will allow business processes to be changed without changing underlying technology.
Thus the world of IT continues to bring new technology and methodology to provide effective IT solutions to business problems.
