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

 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

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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 reﬂect 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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