IBM Software

Thought Leadership White Paper

October 2011

BPM in a governed SOA environmentSmart work in the smart enterprise

2 BPM in a governed SOA environment

Contents

2 The role and value of SOA in BPM

3 Common stumbling blocks in BPM based on SOA

4 Value of SOA governance in successful BPM programs

7 Creating synergy between the BPM and SOA life cycles

8 The IBM BPM/SOA platform

10 Conclusion

Management summaryIn an age of agile change, IT boundaries are becoming obstaclesto business success. There was a time when isolation and encap-sulation of functionality was required to manage IT complexity.In today’s world it is rather the complexity of business changeand the need for business agility that require IT focus.Interestingly, cloud computing will drive this transformation at afast pace, because of its ability to rapidly source business and ITresources, thereby eliminating a significant part of the advantageof having a large legacy portfolio.

Consequently IT must evolve. Boundaries must be dulled.Business process management (BPM) capabilities (processdesign, execution and more) must align with service-orientedarchitecture (SOA), and the life cycles of processes and servicesmust be effectively coordinated. The alignment of BPM and

SOA governance processes provides enterprises with a morestreamlined ability to identify and support opportunities forchange, to redesign business processes and to compose thoseprocesses based on well-defined enterprise services. All of whichresults in faster time to market, reduced time to value andimproved return on investment.

This white paper describes the principles for building BPM solu-tions that use governed services. The primary audiences arearchitects and governance leaders that work in an environmentin which BPM and SOA are both present and used.

The role and value of SOA in businessprocess managementThe modern enterprise is a network of complex interactions. It rests on a growing set of relationships between employees,customers, suppliers and partners. It encompasses the people, theprocesses and the systems inside and outside the organization. It continues to get broader and more complex in our modernglobalized business environment. And above all, it is alwayschanging. Suppliers come and go. Regulations change. Newrelationships emerge. Beyond the complexity, it is indeed adynamic business network.

At the heart of this dynamic network is a set of businessprocesses that have participants who span organizational boundaries.

3IBM Software

Process analysis andoperational excellence

Architectural disciplineand explicit governance

Business process management

Service-oriented architecture

To those with an SOA background, the preceding graphic lookslike an enterprise service bus, a similarity that is not coincidental.Specifically, in this case it is the business service bus, connectingthe consumers and providers of business functions throughoutthe enterprise landscape—a set of connections that it is very beneficial to explicitly define, govern and manage. TheIBM whitepaper, “Achieving business agility with BPM and SOAtogether,” demonstrates the natural synergy between BPM andSOA1 and illustrates the relationship between the two as shownin the following graphic.

Customers PartnersService

providers Investors Others. . .

Insurance

Finance

Healthcare

Transportation

BPM engages the business in continuous process improvementto flexibly automate a wide range of business processes, from thehuman-centric and ad hoc to the more documented and struc-tured. SOA helps make the underlying technology that supportsthe business less rigid and more agile by integrating the businessthrough linked, repeatable business tasks and services.

It is SOA that transforms the enterprise network from a set ofpoint-to-point connections to a well-orchestrated set of servicessupporting mission critical end-to-end business processes. In fact, as processes evolve through continuous process improvement and as the handling of exceptions becomes morestructured, the number of process instances that execute in an IT enabled, orchestrated fashion can and should increase.

Common stumbling blocks in BPM basedon SOA While BPM and SOA are inevitably linked through the notionof processes orchestrating and executing services, there are somecommon stumbling blocks of which any enterprise should beaware. In an immature BPM and SOA environment, one ormore of the symptoms in the following list are commonly seen.

● Processes drive creation of services … but now we have 10 different services doing roughly the same thing.

● I want to see if there is an existing service that I can reuse …but I don’t know where to look.

● We have created a new version of the process … but we arenot quite sure which version of a key service to use.

4 BPM in a governed SOA environment

the business and IT?What is a good service, to

reuse? adapt? create?

Who is the service meantfor and accessible to?

AccountAccess

Chequing

LineOfCredit

CreditCheck

J

JJ

J

exist between services?What interdependencies How will services locate

and speak to each other?

stateless or stateful?

semantics of a service?What is the syntax and

grained is the service?How coarse or fine

What qualities of serviceare required, and where?

Does a service need to beHow do I compose?How do I implement?

Should I...

Governance:

IT governance:

SOA governance:

Establishing chains of responsibility, authorityand communication to empower people(decision rights)

Establishing measurement, policy and controlmechanisms to enable people to carry out theirroles and responsibilities

Establishing decision making rightsassociated with IT

Establishing mechanisms and policies used tomeasure and control the way IT decisions aremade and carried out

is the intersection of Business and ITgovernance focused on the life cycle of servicesto ensure the business value of SOA? It is the effective management of this lifecycle that is the key goal to SOA governance

SOA governance is a catalystfor improving overall IT governance

Businessgovernance

SOAgovernance

IT governance

● We need a new service (to be used by three differentprocesses) … but we can’t figure out who should pay for it, soit is not being built.

● We want to invest in a good catalog of reusable services … butwe don’t know where to begin.

● We don’t want to build software services until we need them … but we can’t wait for services to be “negotiated” oncewe have a process that needs them.

● I keep getting change requests to my reusable service … so I don’t want anyone else to use it anymore.

Some of these symptoms occur because of a lack of asset management, others because of a lack of ownership and yet others because of a lack of an appropriate funding model. Yetamong all, a common root cause is a lack of up-front architec-tural consideration. It is no coincidence that the “A” in SOAstands for “architecture.” SOA is an architectural style and whenleveraged in a mature fashion begs questions such as thoseshown in the following graphic.

What do I need to think about? What decisions do I need tomake? What principles and patterns should I understand? All ofthese questions lead to the need for also considering culture androle changes as part of a long-term BPM and SOA program. Inparticular, it is important to crystallize the architectural role thatmediates the individual business process need for function and the enterprise need for a robust portfolio of reusable andscalable services.

Value of SOA governance in successfulBPM programsIn the industry there is a lot of talk about SOA governance, butlittle on how SOA governance matters to BPM. To set the context, first the definition of SOA governance that follows.

5IBM Software

Sales

Order

fulfillment

Accounting department Legal

Purchasing

App. 1

Currency conversion service

1. Provide acurrency servicethat fills a specificline of business(LOB)

2. Other LOBs start using the service

3. LOBs increase use of services /quality suffers

4. Service is fixed at provider’s expense

5. Fix works temporarily but problem reappears

6. Maintenance costs soar / so provider ends service

App. 2

SOA governance addresses exactly the types of issues that arecommon stumbling blocks for BPM, based on SOA. And as wesee in the list shown in the preceding graphic, SOA governanceis just as much, if not more, an organizational issue (fundingmodel, ownership, incentives to do the right thing and more) as

it is a technical one. However, technical issues like enterprise-wide design, proactive monitoring to understand scaling andtiming still need to be addressed.

Imagine the following scenario for how an originally well-conceived service fails in the end.

6 BPM in a governed SOA environment

Process

owner Business

users

Business

leader

IT

architect

IT developer

IT leader

Business

analyst

“How can I worksmarter supported byflexible and dynamicprocesses modeled

for the new waypeople buy, live &

work?”

This scenario was a result of a lack of:

● An ownership model that discusses who owns and is responsible for funding throughout the life cycle of a service.Ideally the funding model will incent providers to producehigh-quality services and allow them to recover their costs fordeveloping and maintaining services or even generate addi-tional revenue for taking on these challenges.

● Guarantees (could be contractual) for the consumers that aservice would operate as planned with consistent quality toincent them to accept the provider as a formidable depend-ency. Without such guarantees, consumers are potentially putin harm’s way by depending on distributed functionality thatthey have no control over.

It also shows what happens when you do not take a holisticapproach to designing services. You need to have an idea of theamount of load placed on a service and design to that load. Sincethe accounting department in the scenario shown in the preced-ing figure assumed that they were the only ones to use it, theirinitial design was probably “good enough.” However, as soon asother consumers started to use it, it became apparent that thisadditional load should have been a key consideration.

The keys to effective SOA governance are as follows:

● Plan for evolving governance from the beginning: Avoidimplementing governance after the fact. Grow governance asthe project grows.

● Define scope, objectives, roles, responsibilities, decision rights,metrics, policies and more: Ensure adequate buy-in from allstakeholders. Build collaborative trust.

● Communication, communication, communication: Successfulorganizations use multiple internal channels to iteratively communicate and secure buy-in.

● Have the ability to execute: Ensure that project teams areempowered to execute.

All of which in turn support the collaborative life cycle for building and managing good BPM solutions.

7IBM Software

Creating synergy between the BPM andSOA lifecyclesAt first glance the collaborative lifecycle for BPM in the preced-ing illustration may seem at odds with IBM’s SOA life-cyclemodel. Indeed, some might say that a choice between a service-centric viewpoint or a process-centric viewpoint must be made.

• SOA service-centric viewpoint:- Everything is a service, including processes, people and information- New requirements for services come from SOA life cycle, including the need for process services

• BPM business process-centric viewpoint:- Everything is driven by a business process- Business processes follow own life cycle (independent of the SOA life cycle)- Services are consumed by business processes- Services may be embedded in the BPM life cycle or can be external to it- New requirements for services can be driven out of business process design

Process

owner Business

users

Business

analyst

IT leader

IT developer

IT

architect

Business

leader

Assemble

ModelDeploy

Manage

Governance& Processes

While the BPM and SOA viewpoints are different, they are notreally in conflict. On the contrary, processes and services areboth key elements of a combined BPM and SOA environment,each having an independently managed lifecycle in its own right.Yet while independent, these two lifecycles also have importantcoordination points—after all, it will not do to have a processdeployed to production if the services upon which it depends arenot also production ready.

8 BPM in a governed SOA environment

Discover Storyboard

Deploy

Integrate Manage

ExperienceBPM life cycle

SOA life cycle

Operational Identified

Specified

RealizedStaged

Certified

At the storyboard stage of a process, focus is on identifying newservices or finding existing ones that map to business activities.Even at this early stage, expectations must be managed in termsof service capabilities that can be brought to bear.

At the experience stage of a process, stakeholder “playbacks” ofthe process will seed the service specification lifecycle phase withbusiness requirements.

At the manage stage of a process, as business processes are tailored to the desired end-user experience and process perform-ance is optimized, supporting services will begin the realization

phase of their lifecycle. Especially important is that as processesmature, the requirements on scalability and flexibility of theunderlying services will increase.

At the integrate stage of a process, integration will involve testingand certification against functional and nonfunctional require-ments that are captured in the service SLAs.

Finally, at the deploy stage of a process, a “snapshot” or version ofthe process application is deployed into production; at the sametime, the services consumed by that snapshot must become operational in the deployment environment.

Obviously, without predefined governance processes to coordi-nate the lifecycle touch points, the sync points mentioned earlierwill not be managed, nor will there be any guarantee that the resulting process performs as expected in the operationalenvironment.

The IBM BPM/SOA platform The first premise for collaboration lifecycle coordination ismutual visibility. Typically, an enterprise will have different rolesperforming process engineering and service engineering.Certainly, the tools applied are different in cases where servicesare also used outside the context of a BPM platform.

The integration between the IBM Business Process Managerplatform and IBM® WebSphere® Service Registry andRepository (WSRR) delivers such visibility without detractingfrom the value of WSRR as the overall service registry andrepository of the enterprise.

9IBM Software

IBMIntegrationDesigner

IBM Process DesignerProcess CenterConsole

Performance AdminConsole

Process Portal andBusiness Space

Process Admin Console

Discover services

Configure runtimegovernance

Run rogueservices reports*

Process Center

Repository

WSRR ProcessCenterServer

PerfData

Warehouse

ProcessServerEnforce SOA runtime

governance

ProcessServer

ProcessServer

PorfData

Warehouse

PorfData

Warehouse

PorfData

Warehouse

Staging Test Production

WSRR WSRR WSRR

10 BPM in a governed SOA environment

The basic visibility is provided by making services in WSRR visible to, and available for use in, the IBM Process Designerand IBM Integration Designer components of the IBM BusinessProcess Manager platform. On top of this basic visibility anenterprise can build more elaborate governance procedures, such as registering IBM Business Process Manager process applications or toolkits as service consumers in WSRR.

ConclusionWhile much focus in the industry has been on SOA governance,less has been said on the interaction between BPM and governedservices. Nevertheless, at the heart of continuous business opti-mization is the proper orchestration of well-defined enterpriseservices. In particular, ungoverned change cannot be allowed todeteriorate process effectiveness or even break process execution.

For many enterprises the typical approach to process and servicecoordination is to drive service identification and delivery basedon the particular BPM solution currently in scope. While cer-tainly viable for short term value and success, such an approachdoes not scale over time. A more flexible and scalable approachis to leverage the power of BPM and SOA governance together.By coordinating process and services lifecycles, without lettingone take control of the other, enterprises can take control oftheir processes yet, at the same time, base those processes on ascalable and governed portfolio of enterprise services.

For more informationTo learn more about BPM in a governed SOA environment,please contact your IBM marketing representative orIBM Business Partner, or visit the following website(s):ibm.com/bpm

About the authors● Claus Torp Jensen, Senior Technical Staff Member and Chief

Architect for SOA-BPM-EA Technical Strategy● Matt Sanchez, STSM and Lead Architect for BPM Repository

and Governance● John Falkl, Distinguished Engineer and Chief Architect for

SOA Governance● John Colgrave, STSM and Chief Architect for WSRR

References

IBM white paper, Change Governance in a SOA and

BPM Environment, Claus T Jensen, 2010.

IBM white paper, BPM and SOA require robust and

scalable information systems, Claus T Jensen, Rob High,Jr., Steve Mills, 2009.

IBM Redbooks. Service Lifecycle Governance withIBM WebSphere Service Registry and Repository, Nicole Hargrove, Ian Heritage, Prasad Imandi, Martin Keen,Wendy Neave, Laura Olson, Bhargav Perepa, Andrew White, 2009.

Notes

Please Recycle

© Copyright IBM Corporation 2011

IBM CorporationSoftware GroupRoute 100Somers, NY 10589U.S.A.

Produced in the United States of AmericaNovember 2011All Rights Reserved

IBM, the IBM logo, ibm.com, and WebSphere are trademarks ofInternational Business Machines Corporation in the United States, othercountries or both. If these and other IBM trademarked terms are marked ontheir first occurrence in this information with a trademark symbol (® or ™),these symbols indicate U.S. registered or common law trademarks owned byIBM at the time this information was published. Such trademarks may alsobe registered or common law trademarks in other countries. A current list ofIBM trademarks is available on the web at “Copyright and trademarkinformation” at ibm.com/legal/copytrade.shtml

Other company, product or service names may be trademarks or servicemarks of others.

1 IBM white paper, Achieving business agility with BPM and SOA together,Claus T Jensen, Rob High, Jr., Steve Mills, 2009.

WSW14172-USEN-00