The SOA Consortium™announced that a podcast and slide deck of the presentation by JP Morgenthal, EA, SOA, BPM & Cloud Computing Strategist on “Disassembling the SOA & BPM Relationship,” recorded at the March 2009 meeting of the SOA Consortium in Washington, D.C. are now available. To access the podcast, visit http://www.soa-consortium.org/pr-dc-jpm.

JP Morgenthal gave a provocative talk on “Disassembling the SOA & BPM Relationship.” Morgenthal opened with his contention that SOA and BPM are not the hand-in-hand partners that the technology press and vendors would like everyone to believe. More so, SOA is not a prerequisite for BPM success. In backing these assertions, Morgenthal described BPM as a practice that encompasses modeling, testing, implementing and measuring business processes, with supporting methodology to gather requirements, document processes, define KPIs, capture metrics, analyze results and optimize outcomes.

This view of BPM as a business discipline comes straight from the business practitioners whom Morgenthal interacts with on a regular basis. The confusion on the SOA-BPM relationship comes from IT professionals, who solely focus on the execution engine (BPMS) of any BPM initiative. As Morgenthal pointed out, many successful BPM initiatives have no underlying technology implementation.

Morgenthal’s perspective provided for a lively discussion with meeting attendees. The prevailing counter case was that SOA also has a business design element, that many businesses are organized as business services, with supporting process implementations. A supporting point was that business personnel are more likely to think in terms of services than processes.

To hear the entire presentation and discussion, download the 52-minute podcast and accompanying slide presentation at http://www.soa-consortium.org/pr-dc-jpm. To read more about this podcast or to share your views, visit the SOA Consortium’s SOA Insights blog at http://blog.soa-consortium.org.

The next SOA Consortium meeting is in San Antonio, Texas on September 16-17, 2009. Organizations interested in joining the SOA Consortium and attending the meeting should visit the website, http://www.soa-consortium.org or email info@soa-consortium.org for more information.

The SOA Consortium is an advocacy group of end users, service providers and technology vendors committed to helping the Global 1000, major government agencies, and mid-market businesses successfully adopt Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) by 2010. SOA Consortium founding enterprise members include Fortune 200 companies in Financial Services, Travel, Manufacturing, Retail and Telecommunications. Sponsors are Cisco, HP, IBM Corporation, Layer 7 Technologies, MegaPractical, NEC Sphere, SPARX Systems and Sun Microsystems, Inc. Participants include Fortune 1000 corporations, major government agencies and non-governmental organizations. Any organization may join the SOA Consortium. The SOA Consortium is managed by OMG.