The “Why” and the “How” At Fujitsu, we believe that BPM and SOA are joined at the proverbial hip. Let’s use the example of a large financial institution that wanted to automate its process for opening brokerage accounts, thereby reducing the error rates resulting from manually processing these accounts. Developing a scenario that would increase the accuracy (and - by extension - the productivity and cost-effectiveness) of the business process described above is considered Business Process Management. Recognizing the need for implementing a solution was the “why” that drove this financial services heavyweight to invest in a BPM solution. How do you implement a BPM solution so that you can flexibly access a myriad of back-end systems inside and outside the organization to support this business process? The “how” to implement is what SOA is all about. SOA consists of creating standards-based reusable components that benefit multiple applications across the organization. SOA Governance and Management - The “Glue”
As the number of reusable components such as Web Services mushrooms, the ability to easily discover, manage, monitor and analyze the use of these components has become critical. You can’t reuse what you can’t find. Enter the need for SOA Governance and Management solutions. These offerings serve as “stores” for reusable components created inside and outside the enterprise. The chief benefit of these solutions lies in their ability to easily search for and reuse the components and to quickly understand the impact on other applications should you decide to make changes to any of them. This SOA store serves as the DNA for your enterprise. Ingredients for “People-Integration” and “System-Integration” Business people and analysts know their business processes, and IT professionals know their systems and infrastructures. The challenge is for business people to transform their vision into processes that can be easily deployed by IT while leveraging their existing systems and infrastructure without significant rework. At Fujitsu, we believe that you should always start with the existing stores of information and make them accessible to all stakeholders. A combination of BPM and an Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) helps you do just that. Together with a SOA Governance and Management solution that serves as the common ground for both business and IT professionals, you have all the ingredients to ensure seamless collaboration on shared processes, resources, and information through a single interface.
Top-Down or Bottom-Up? Where Do I Start? The mandate in most enterprises recently has been to consolidate applications, systems, and IT organizations and to employ SOA projects to achieve this goal. In situations where processes are only dependent on interactions between back-end applications, a bottom-up approach using an ESB such as the Fujitsu Interstage Service Orchestrator might suffice. However, we understand that business processes do not always consist only of applications that need to be integrated; it also requires that people interact with these applications and collaborate across departments to fulfill the business tasks at hand. In these cases, a top-down approach is in order by using a BPM solution such as the Fujitsu Interstage Business Process Manager. The true benefits of SOA-enabled BPM are achieved when top-down meets bottom-up with an SOA Governance and Management solution such as CentraSite, which serves to seamlessly join the two.
The Sum of It All: Collaboration Between People Made Simple The end goal of any BPM or SOA initiative is to improve the communication and processes within an enterprise to help deliver superior products and services to its end customers. Better collaboration and communication on objectives, processes, implementation plans, and optimization efforts between business and IT professionals through the use of BPM and SOA technology contributes to the bottom line. Fujitsu remains committed to helping its customers and partners achieve that goal. For more information on the Fujitsu Interstage offerings for BPM and SOA, visit us at www.fujitsu.com/interstage, or contact us through Interstage@us.fujitsu.com.