As Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) cautiously slips out of the realm of technicians and begins to find its way into the vocabulary of the people responsible for running the business, the inadequacies of the parameters used to describe, plan, manage and measure IT in this form are becoming painfully apparent.

While IT teams now have a handle on the metrics they need to gauge the performance and benefits of services, business people are at a loss in trying to understand what the true impact and value of SOA is for the organization.

Enterprises are beginning to recognize the capacity the enterprise architecture holds for helping to align the worlds of business and IT, as it incorporates activities such as requirements gathering, expectation setting, analysis and reporting of key performance data to be used by both the IT and business into the enterprise architecture context. This has also led to SOA being increasingly understood in relation to Enterprise Architecture Management (EAM) best practices.

The EAM best practices addressing SOA management include aligning the business goals and requirements with specific services, identifying where services will provide the greatest impact and benefit for the business, and various portfolio and asset management technologies. Using these methodologies, companies can match their needs, goals, requirements and expectations in such a way to ensure that current and future deployments stay on track and continually meet the needs of the business without negatively impacting IT.

This approach was strongly endorsed at the recent “SOA Days” event in Bonn, at which a number of IT leaders of major German companies confirmed their view that EAM is an absolute prerequisite for SOA.

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After years of repeated messaging from across the industry, there now seems to be a general recognition of the bigger process management picture that provides the backdrop for the underlying technology hawked by BPM(S) [add or remove the ‘S’ depending on what they are selling you…more on this later] vendors.

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Like Sandy Kemsley I am uncomfortable using the phrase ‘Eating Your Own Dog Food’. As a vendor, using our own software should be a desirable and valuable effort, whereas (for most of us at least) eating dogfood….not so much! In a recent post, Sandy put out a request for BPM vendors to describe what they are doing with their own software. The timing was great for Software AG as we have recently started an effort - ‘BPM@Software AG’ - to document and communicate years of internal experience and results with BPM.

More information about ‘BPM@Software AG’ will propogate over the channels over coming months, but in a nutshell, here are some of the things we are doing.

Global Sourcing - Establishing a world-class global purchasing organization supported by standardized, flexible and transparent processes.

New Hire Approvals - Rapid, automated and paperless approval for new hires with real-time transparency for all process stakeholders. This represents the first phase of a broader HR Onboarding initiative.

Global Deal Desk - Harmonizing and accelerating global deal flow with automated workflow-based approval and real-time transparency.

Solution Center Management - Streamlining the processes for creating (both internally and outsourced to partners), managing and requesting assets for customers demos, proof of concepts and implementations. Given the value we are generating with our own BPM solution, Software AG will be ‘Drinking Our Own Champagne’ (much more appealing!) for some years to come!