Understanding business process management / service-oriented architecture from business perspective (page 1 of 3)

In this article, we take a look at BPM/SOA frameworks, how they can contribute to the performance of HR, Finance, Sales, Marketing, etc. departments' business users and why they are important for the Middle East market!

IT industry, and especially the enterprise software market, has always been a dynamic platform. Especially within the last five years, Middle East (ME) has truly become a part of this dynamism. As the companies are getting more sophisticated in software usage, this is creating a momentum for more solution providers to flood into the ME market and providing more alternatives for the users. More supply of options is contributing to the learning curve of businesses and in return, equally contributing to more demand for better solutions from the software vendors. This whole supply and demand relation is in a way making the lives of companies a bit tougher as the state of inequilibrium is pushing more IT concepts, frameworks, business applications and infrastructure solutions into the everyday lives of the end-users, C-level executives and the trading partners of these companies. IT is not only combining internal divisions on-line, but also extending its reach to any entity that touches the company's business processes in various ways. Therefore, the streamlining of an entity's operations to create 'value-chains' across these business processes is making more business sense than ever since it is harder to establish these chains with so many disparate systems in place.

As the experience of companies in Middle East with software usage increases, IT related investments are getting perceived as an integral part of their performance. Business users and IT are getting more involved in their decision making process for leading their entity. IT had always been the originator of software projects or the primary owner of software selection processes, but today, business users are also getting involved in selection, in-house development and packaged software implementation processes. This involvement was pretty much more applicable to the business applications or the so-called industry solutions. However, in the last 2 years, it is overflowing into the seemingly complex and not-so-business-user-friendly 'techy' topics. For this particular reason, IT vendors who have solutions and experience in the areas of both Business Solutions (CRM, HR, SCM, etc.) and Technology Solutions (Database, Middleware, etc.) are being seen as more valuable partners to work with from the perspectives of business and IT entities.

Collaborative involvement of IT and business users in projects is a critical success factor. Though in various cases, it might not prove sufficient! Have you ever experienced firsthand the "business/IT alignment gap" resulting from traditional development approaches? First, business analysts explore and document requirements on their own for months. Once those requirements are frozen, IT develops the application. Many months later, the application is completed, and everyone is surprised that the original requirements have shifted, were misinterpreted, or simply incorrectly analyzed. Let's be honest: it's very hard (even impossible) to get everything right in one iteration. But after 12-18 months, time is running short and unfortunately, the application has been designed with little flexibility for change. Hence, it becomes a liability, not an asset, from Day 1. Soon, a new application will be built from scratch to replace its predecessor in another "big bang" IT project...