BPM & Service-Oriented Architectures (SOA)
A Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) facilitates the development of modular business services offering that can easily be re-used, offering organisations a distinct technical advantage that provides significant and highly visible commercial benefits.
By loosely-coupling both internal and external services with existing applications and systems, organisations can now build and maintain processes that capture and manage critical information whilst consistently adhering to business logic and rules.
Customers, suppliers, trading partners and important stakeholders will in turn benefit from superior information visibility and improved data organisation provided by SOA, whilst organisations will greatly reduce the complexity and costs associated with the modification of existing applications to provide an integrated solution.
SOA achieves substantial additional value when combined with BPM technology such as Orbis TaskCentre, whereby the modelling and deployment of business processes and human workflow are maintained away from core systems whilst still retaining the ability to integrate and communicate at any given touch point.
Historical approaches to software design have restricted the possibility of implementing an SOA and as a result many organisations have suffered from the pains of limited application connectivity. Yet, because of the pressures of modern business, and the realisation that creating an SOA is imperative for success, many organisations have resorted to hard wiring application connectivity and business processes.
Ironically, this short-sighted approach to implementing an SOA has become the painful achilles heal for many businesses as their processes need to adapt rapidly. But traditionally the ability to change hard-coded functionality is both slow and costly.
Why is BPM software an important element to creating a SOA?
The TaskCentre BPM Suite is an invaluable tool for implementing a true SOA for two reasons. Firstly, it enables the organisation to loosely-couple multiple applications together by using a simple drag and drop interface. This exposes information to stakeholders enabling timely decisions that deliver lower operational costs and greater agility.
The second benefit of the TaskCentre BPM Suite for implementing an SOA, is that it enables organisations to quickly and easily configure and reconfigure automated, self-service or event-driven information services that address the needs of the organisation’s diverse information consumers.
What is an ‘Information Service’?
An information service is a specific piece of information or data which is important to a given stakeholder, that resides in a given application(s) and that may be presented through any number of communication mechanisms. These mechanisms can include web services, SMS, e-mail, customer web portals or indeed any other compatible technology.
It is through this exposure of specific blocks of information to stakeholders that organisations can significantly enhance customer service, reduce administration costs and enable the organisation to meet the pace of modern commerce.
Illustrations of popular information services:
- • Alerting and notifications services
- • Document automation services
- • Workflow and human interaction
- • Web services and data integration services
- • Subscription and request services
- • Web portal and content management services
The business benefits of an SOA
- • Lower operational costs
- • Greater agility
- • Perfect visibility of all company information
- • Removal of slow, human-led information fulfilment
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