Johannesburg, 08 May 2003
Revolution or evolution, take or leave it, but IT is moving from a data-centric approach to a process-centric approach.
One of the key drivers in this new process-centric view in the IT market place, is so-called `Web services` technology, which essentially acts as a modern form of the data exchange, except that Web services acts as an electronic application interchange instead. The beauty of the technology is that they are sensitive to the process in which they participate and do not require intimate knowledge of the encapsulated application.
"These are not only creating enormous excitement among suppliers, but also among IT directors, who are starting to see the major advances in integration productivity which they enable."
That is the view of Mark Ehmke, Managing Director of Staffware in SA, a major business process management (BPM) supplier.
"However, to be really effective on an enterprise-wide scale, Web services still need to be managed - and it has emerged quite clearly that BPM tools are the best candidates for the job.
"BPM is an important first step towards a service-based model for IT. We believe that technology should support the business and to do that, we need to break free of the data-centric, silo-application approach to IT," Ehmke states.
"BPM and Web services help re-establish businesses` control over IT. New innovations including, Web services and grid technology, will combine with BPM to allow users to quickly, easily and even invisibly use technology resources of all kinds to support their requirements," he explains further.
According to Ehmke, users will initiate the business processes they need without having to know the name, type or even location of the IT resources that support it.
Ehmke`s statements are reinforced by META Group research, which states that through 2002/3, Web services technology will be adopted by leading IT vendors as the preferred application integration technique, replacing proprietary programming interfaces (APIs) as the new and better way to expose legacy application business logic and simplify EAI adaptor development.
An article in the latest edition of Infoconomy magazine states that "two emerging but interlocking technologies specifically address many problem areas of modern business enterprises: Web services and BPM. While the former technology, Web services, has been much hyped and widely discussed, BPM may yet emerge as a pre-condition to its effective deployment."
The article goes on to point out that, in order for Web services to fully participate in most enterprise architectures, the flow of processes will have to be re-engineered to include the extra services. "And they may again have to be rewritten every time a business process or a Web service changes. BPM systems should enable this to be done at a higher, more holistic and efficient level," explains Ehmke.
Where is the industry currently, with respect to Web services and BPM?
"Vendors such as Staffware are busy writing Web services packages right now," says Ehmke.
"We recognise that Web services, inter alia, represent an enormous opportunity for us, as BPM global leaders, in that space," he adds.
He admits that there will be competition from other sectors of the market place, such as from former enterprise application integration (EAI) vendors, who are attempting to position themselves as being capable of managing Web services repositories too.
"We believe that this is fundamentally a question of managing processes, rather than merely business objects in a repository or database," comments Ehmke.
In another recent article, Infoconomy magazine states that EAI clearly plays a role in this environment. However, it points out that critics, and some customers, are becoming increasingly concerned that these products do not do enough. "The two concerns centre around the fact that EAI systems are inflexible; and that even the most sophisticated products are only designed to link together whole applications or hardwired business processes and their associated data. They do not give the ability to compose or disassemble processes," he adds.
"In the words of Howard Smith, Chairman of the Business Process Management Initiative (BPMI), IT has always been data-centric, while business is process-centric. And that has largely accounted for the dichotomy between IT and business. However, we need to support the drive towards integration and becoming more and more process-centric," Ehmke concludes.
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