Service Oriented Architecture Field Guide for Executives

2.12. IMPROVE OR ALTER THE BUSINESS PROCESS

Continuous improvement of operational efficiency is a key goal of BPM. The motivation to make changes to a process can come from suboptimal KPI values, changing business conditions (new partnerships or new customers), changes to government regulations, and pressure from the competition. Details of process optimization are beyond the scope of this book. We should, however, discuss how SOA helps the reengineering activity.

SOA is supposed make a business more agile. By that we mean that a business can implement a change to its processes faster once the need for the change is realized. Exactly how does SOA do that?

The factors that take up the time between the remodeling of a process and putting the process into practice include retraining of staff, informing the partner and supplier, and finally, writing new software. SOA shortens the time IT takes to implement the necessary changes. SOA does this by following two principles: service reuse and service abstraction.

How Does Service Reuse Help?

Recall from our earlier discussions that an orchestration asks various services to perform certain tasks. As long as the modified process does not call for a brand-new task to be carried out, we can simply use the existing services to implement the orchestration. That means that the new process model is free to do things in a different order, or do various things in parallel, and none of these changes will require IT to build new services.

In the ...