Chapter 7. SOA and Business Process Management

In previous chapters, we discussed the general "renovation roadmap" that describes the evolution of an enterprise IT infrastructure toward a more agile Service-Oriented Architecture. We examined fundamental and networked SOAs as the initial stages in great detail. According to our roadmap, the final stage in this evolution are process-enabled SOAs. Although process-centric services can be realized in many different ways (and can thus take many different shapes and forms), business process management (BPM) represents possibly the most consequent approach to process-enabling an SOA. Consequently, we provide a general introduction to BPM in this chapter, followed by a discussion on how BPM fits into the SOA landscape. In this chapter, we focus more on the technical (computational and architectural) aspects, while Chapters 12, "The Organizational SOA Roadmap," and Chapter 13, "SOA-Driven Project Management," concentrate on the IT strategy and project-management aspects.