The Next Leap in Productivity: What Top Managers Really Need to Know about Information Technology

5.10. The Real Payoff of SOA: Business Process Engineering

SOA makes business logic visible so that you can easily orchestrate and improve it. For example, assume that a bank's loan process involves the following workflow, which passes through a number of programs: A customer requests a loan via the Web service; this request is analyzed by a bank employee, who might in turn perform a series of appraisals, credit checks, financing, and so on.

When you convert each of these programs to a Web service, first of all, you are going to find a lot of duplicated software functionality that can now be eliminated.

In addition to discovering unnecessary software capabilities, you are going to find unnecessary tasks that people are doing. Said bluntly, a more streamlined process requires fewer people to run it, just as a supertanker requires fewer people to sail it than an eighteenth-century merchantman did.

Business process management (BPM) was designed to define and automate these types of Web service-enabled business processes. It allows process automation without traditional coding and programming; as a result, automated processes can be rapidly prototyped, developed, and modified—even by individuals with limited development experience.

This means that you, the CEO, can play around with ways of structuring your business just as you would play around with Legos. When you find a better way of organizing the business, through Web service-enabled processes and BPM, it is a relatively straightforward ...