The ability to readily change and optimize business processes is the key to organizational competitiveness and growth. Organizational agility can be compromised when supporting IT assets cannot flexibly respond to changing business needs. Unlocking IT resources from their application silos and making their functionality broadly available across the organization promotes both business process optimization and organizational agility. Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) is a design approach that promotes better alignment of IT with business needs, enabling both IT and the Business to more quickly respond and adapt to changing business pressures and opportunities.
Microsoft's SOA and Business Process portfolio includes a broad array of offers spanning Business Strategy, IT Strategy and Solution Delivery. This portfolio provides IT professionals, architects and developers with the guidance, technologies and tools for scoping, designing, building and maintaining SOA and Business Process solutions. It also provides them with personal productivity software that enables business users to streamline and optimize business processes in a manner that increases productivity, lowers costs and promotes organizational agility.
IT departments are managing increasingly complex IT portfolios. Yet as business needs change, these departments must still ensure that their technologies remain aligned with business goals. Failure to do so compromises organizational agility.
Service orientation is an approach to organizing distributed IT resources into an integrated solution that breaks down information silos and maximizes business agility. Service orientation modularizes IT resources, creating loosely coupled business processes that integrate information across business systems. Each IT resource, whether an application, system or trading partner, can be accessed as a service. These capabilities are available through interfaces; complexity arises when service providers differ in their operating system or communication protocols, resulting in inoperability.
Service orientation is a means for integrating across diverse systems. Service orientation uses standard protocols and conventional interfaces—usually Web services—to facilitate access to business logic and information among diverse services. Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) provides the principles and guidance to transform a company's existing array of heterogeneous, distributed, complex and inflexible IT resources into integrated, simplified and highly flexible resources that can be changed and composed to more directly support business goals. SOA ultimately enables the delivery of a new generation of dynamic applications (sometimes called composite applications). These applications provide end users with more accurate and comprehensive information and insight into processes, as well as the flexibility to access it in the most suitable form and presentation factor, whether through the Web or through a rich client or mobile device.
Business processes underlie all organizational efforts, and the effectiveness with which they are carried out contributes directly to critical business goals such as customer retention, length of time it takes to fulfill a product order or service, or regulatory compliance.
Business process management (BPM) is a management discipline that combines a process-centric and cross-functional approach to improving how organizations achieve their business goals. A BPM solution provides the tools that help make these processes explicit, as well as the functionality to help business managers control and change both manual and automated workflows. Although early implementations of BPM have unfolded in large enterprises, managing business processes is critical for any size of organization that would benefit from greater visibility into and control over the processes that support their business goals.
Business process management has its origins in total quality management and business process reengineering. While it adds to these a technological framework, it is more than just the combination of these disciplines. BPM is an IT enabled management discipline that promotes organizational agility and supports the efforts of people to drive process change and rapid innovation. As such, BPM supports the alignment of IT and business activities both within the organization and with business partners and suppliers.