Unleashing the Power of BPM through Web Services

Long touted as a revolutionary technology, Web services promise to make IT infrastructures obsolete. They enable the free flow of information across systems, lowering the cost and complexity of integration across entire enterprises.

They have moved to the forefront of IT and business executives' minds as an increased focus on real-time transaction processing, collaborative manufacturing, and e-commerce drive a strong demand for external integration (B2B) and Business Process Management (BPM). After all, the success of any business rests with process management since companies realize that broken or badly managed processes drain resources and profits.

BPM solutions define structured, efficient and easily reconfigurable processes to support a company's operations. Optimally, they allow an organization to change its processes quickly when conditions shift in the business environment. Bottom line: BPM solutions make a company "nimble" to adapt quickly and gain - or maintain - competitive advantages.

Enterprise application integration (EAI) has evolved from its traditional role as "middleware" to an advanced form of business integration. It is at an evolutionary point that promises to create a new breed of business integration, one where disparate platforms and heterogeneous environments work together. It focuses on executing new and enhanced business processes within the integration software.

Web services could offer the key to unleashing the power of BPM. They enhance its benefits by providing lower integration costs, accelerating the time to market, through shorter implementation cycles, and increasing the ability to adapt (e.g., dynamic binding of process steps.)

Now that companies can adapt more quickly through this next generation of BPM-Web services, many competitive advantages emerge. In The Power of Corporate Kinetics, authors Michael Fradette and Steve Michaud suggest that self-adapting, self-renewing, and instant-action enterprises can:

Serve a single customer: Provide the sales relationships, products, and services to match the infinitely diverse and changing demands of individual customers, one by one.

Act in zero time: Meet demands and exploit market opportunities instantly by means of simultaneous enterprise collaborations and actions.

However, a number of challenges exist that companies must pvercome before they can harness the power of Web services and BPM successfully. For example, Web services lack adequate security. Current standards cover only basic connecting services. Such fundamental integration services as orchestration, universal data definitions, and transaction management, among others, are in their infancy, and it will take time before their completion and adoption.

Therefore, it is important to recognize that Web services do not replace EAI. Rather, they work with it to create a new and improved BPM, thereby moving enterprises toward a higher level of business process integration that is more dynamic and reconfigurable.

Driven by Web services, BPM offers a prime opportunity to create new types of business solutions that were impossible before. Additionally, as Cathleen Benko and F. Warren McFarlan point out in Connecting the Dots, enterprises that can adapt quickly (that is to say, align their IT solutions with their strategic and operational objectives) not only survive, but also thrive in the "information frontier" that we live in today.

About The Authors
Alejandro Danylyszyn is a senior manager in Deloitte Consulting's Technology Integration practice. He has worked for over 15 years as a consultant to large high-technology manufacturing, telecommunication carriers, and financial services companies in the areas of strategy, operations/process improvement and solution design/implementation, with a focus in systems integration, enterprise portals and web services. adanylyszyn@dc.com

Cesare Rotundo is a senior manager with Deloitte Consulting. He has expertise in the enterprise IT infrastructure, particularly middleware such as EAI, B2Bi, enterprise portals, Web services, and J2EE, with a specific focus on real-time business integration. He has focused in the last year on building enterprise integration solutions around CRM. crotundo@dc.com

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