BCO 5501 – Business Process Engineering

Assignment 2 : BPM Essay

Review Essay:

BPM on top of SOA: Experiences from the Financial Industry

by Steen Brahe
Published on Business Process Management 5th International Conference, BPM 2007

Wang Zhaohui

VICTORIA UNIVERSITY
School of Management & Information System
Lithan Hall Singapore Semester 3, 2010

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BCO 5501 – Business Process Engineering
Assignment 2 : BPM Essay

Abstract. Today’s economies and commodity markets are rapidly changed. The
business process management also changed rapidly in order to increase the
business agility and optimize the costs. The combination of BPM and SOA
nowadays give successful enterprises in business agility. This paper review the
experiences in Danske Bank for using BPM combine with SOA. It is highlight the
successful application from business aspect and focus on the problems and
challenges over the IT department view as well as the lessons learned from the
experiences.

1. Introduction
BPM (Business Process Management) and SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) are two
IT concepts that have received almost unprecedented attention in the last few years (T.
Woodley & S. Gagnon, 2005). SOA and BPM are two divergent disciplines (Imran
Sarwar Bajwa et. al. 2008). SOA is a conceptual business architecture where business
functionality, or application logic, is made available to SOA users, or consumer, as
shared, reusable services on IT network.( Eric A. Marks & 2006). BPM is a blending of
process management/workflow with application integration technology to support rich
human interaction and deep application connectivity (Dave McCoy of the Gartner Group
said in 2001). The combination of SOA and BPM provide great business agility. There is
a Gartner survey of CIO in 2004 which indicated that 43 percent of IT investor interested
in business improvement and same among IT analysts believed that SOA is transforming
and enabling advancement in enterprise architecture (T. Woodley & S. Gagnon, 2005).
This paper review Steen Brahe’s report - BPM on Top of SOA: experiences from the
Financial Industry. In the article, Steen Brahe (2007) reported two major experiences of
using BPM and SOA together in Danske Bank for the pasted four years. Danske Bank is
one of the largest financial institutions in northern Europe. The author majorly use one
of the large project (Customer Package) as show the big business value of BPM
combined with SOA. The complexities and difficulties of adopting BPM and SOA also
mentioned from IT department view, as well as the challenges and lessons.
This paper first review the project development process in Danske Bank base on the life
cycle of BPM and SOA. The second section shows the result of the implementing of the

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BCO 5501 – Business Process Engineering
Assignment 2 : BPM Essay

process and the value of business. The next section will discuss the problems, challenges
as well as the lessons in the experience. The last section will summary the future
perspective for the BPM and SOA.

2. Lifecycle of the Customer Package Project,

In terms of the BPM life cycle, there are many views of the BPM Life Cycle. Imran
Sarwar Bajwwa et. al. (2008) defined the BPM life cycle with three major phases. They
are process modeling, process implementation and process optimization.
In basic terms, SOA is an approach to implementing applications based on the use of
‘services’. The ‘service’ is a re-usable component available either on the internal or
external company network (Arnaud Bezancon 2005). BPM is concerned only with
process-oriented applications (Michael Havey,2005). SOA are concerned on services and
reusable. The BPM and SOA combination allows services to be used as reusable
components.
In Steen Brahe’s report, one major experience is the Customer Package project that
started in 2003, Danske Bank introduced a new sales’ concept called Customer Packages
which bundled a number of financial products and involved in several departments. As
the customer package creation process was highly predictable and production like and
involved several department system. As the services could be used in many departments
system and could be used repeatedly. It means a common service or workflow need for
the project.In the first development life cycle, the developer decided to build a common
services which crossed all departments system. The developer used the Customer
Package Process in Back Office as a pilot for the new system. This is the first version
workflow was basically base on one department. That means only this department could
automate creation of the package. That other department may need many manual work as
the different system and parameters. It was the first version for the project and was
implemented into the production in December 2003. After the workflow implemented,
the developers and management department monitored the process and enabled the
improvement process. The developer optimized the services with common services (like
an account service) in all departments. After continue improvement, the Customer

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BCO 5501 – Business Process Engineering
Assignment 2 : BPM Essay

Package process could automate most customer account creation. For about two years,
the process has systematically been improved and implemented to version 6.

3. The business value of the Customer Package

With the version 6 Customer Package implemented, almost 80 percent of the products
are created automatically compare to the only one department in the initial time. When
the new product initialed in 2003, there are about 200 customer package were handled
each day. After the version 6 implemented, the number is almost 9 times (about 1800
each day). It is great success for the project business value.

4. Problems, Challenges and Lessons

Even the Customer Package project was a successful project. Steen Brahe also pointed
out many problems and challenges encountered in the development process. He majorly
viewed those topics from the IT development perspective other than business
perspective. The major problems are related to test, deployment, operation of the process
instance and change management etc. In the business model implementation, there are
many problems in terms of not completed solution. It means the workflow or process is
have only the mail road. There are many missing or imprecise information and activities,
and may not have properly granularity break down. Those problems usually only can
found after the process tested and implemented. They made the project life cycle much
longer as more improvement or optimization needed.
In addition, the developer also faced many challenges regarding system integration. As
the workflow was integrating systems from different departments and all new software
components must be developed and exposed as services in order to be assessable from
other system. Also there are different location, different standards for the system
integration. Imran et. al.(2008) claimed that a critical success factor of SOA and BPM is
the adoption of industry recognized technology standards, which allow the architecture to
be portable and executable in almost any chosen environment and system. it is important
to selected tools and standard.
Another challenge is fault handling. It is a most time consuming activity during the
development, because there are two categories faults - business faults and technical

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BCO 5501 – Business Process Engineering
Assignment 2 : BPM Essay

faults. The business faults are errors returned from invoked services. The technical faults
may occur several places in the process. That made the faults handling more difficult and
more time consumable.
Steen Brahe also pointed that the developer should challenge the complexity of the
technology and evolution because the technologies to support SOA and BPM are still
evolution, they are changed rapidly and the new technology is not compatible with the
old one. There is much work to convert current workflow in order to fulfill with new
technology.
Steen Brahe had mentioned the lesson which learned from the experience in the project
of Customer Package in Danske Bank was the education and practice samples. He
mentioned that it was not easy to shift from traditional software development to service
orientation, the developer should taken sufficient education and best practice examples.
At least, the major person should be master the technology and understanding of the
business scenario in the project development life cycle. It would great reduce the
misunderstanding between the business management and user.

5. Summary
Form the Steen Brahe’s experiences in Danske Bank, it showed that the combination of
BPM and SOA together could gain successful business value for enterprise. In the past
many years, the topic of BPM and SOA became hot spot. There are many papers have
been describing successful experiences and challenges on adopting BPM and SOA.
Linus Chow et. al. (2007) presented a successful experience for an agile government
project. Zachay B. Wheeler & Roberta Bortolotti (2008) also reported another successful
project for DCRA( Department of Consumer and Regulatory Affairs, USA) with use
Web service to improve the business process flow. Those studies showed that BPM and
SOA together provide more benefit for business process. As BPM provides a wonderful
abstraction for building business systems, SOA provides the application platform to
bridges to the business processes and resources, and with the growth of business on the
Web, together BPM and SOA will master the next phase of business process evolution.

References

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BCO 5501 – Business Process Engineering
Assignment 2 : BPM Essay

1. Arnaud Bezancon 2005, ‘Workflow and Service-Oriented Architecture(SOA)’ in

Layna Fischer (ed) 2005 Workflow Handbook
2. Eric A. Marks & Michael Bell 2005, Service-Oriented Architecture - A Planning
and Implementation Guide for Business and Technology, Wiley & Co
3. Imran Sarwar Bajwa, Rafaqut Kazmi, Shahzad Mumtaz, M. Abbas Choudhary, &
M. Shahid 2008, ’SOA and BPM Partnership: A paradigm for Dynamic and
Flexible Process and IT Management’ in World Academy of Science,
Engineering and technology Issue 45
4. Linus Chow, Charles Medley & Clay Richardson 2007, ‘BPM and Service-
Oriented Architecture Teamed Together: A Pathway to Success for an Agile
Government’ in Layna Fischer(ed) 2007 Workflow Handbook.
5. Michael Havey 2005, Essential Business Process Modeling, O’Reilly
6. Thomas Woodley & Stephane Gagnon 2005, ‘ BPM and SOA: Synergies and
Challenges’ in AnneH.H.Ngu, Masaru Kitsuregawa, Erich J. Neuhold, Jen-Yao
Chung & Quan Z. Sheng (eds), Web Information Systems Engineering- WISE
2005
7. Zachay B. Wheeler & Roberta Bortolotti 2008 ‘Using SOA and Web Services to
Improve Business Process Flow’ in Layna Fischer (ed) 2008 Workflow
Handbook.

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