[Cross-posted from SAP Community Network: Puneet Suppal’s SAP Network Blog ]
In an earlier post (Café Innovation – The Business Process Enterprise), I had sought to make the case for recognizing that the business process orientation of an organization is an imperative that can make the difference between the success and failure of its SOA journey. We said that if process excellence were to be achieved, we needed to move away from the traditional functional silos and the damaging divide between IT and Business. In my SAP NetWeaver Magazine (Summer 2008) column, I introduced this in an article titled: SOA Success: Is Your Organization a Business Process Enterprise? While this article made the point that “until an organization can truly function as a Business Process Enterprise, it will not be able to fully exploit its enterprise SOA capabilities,” the successor piece in my column appearing in the Fall 2008 issue of this same magazine, titled: SOA Success: The Role of Senior Management in Establishing a Business Process Enterprise seeks to point out that this will remain a noble goal unless there is true and demonstrable senior leadership commitment to taking the organization beyond just using SOA as another enabling tool.
In my interaction with individuals at SAP events and within various organizations, I have noticed a lot of excitement in the rank and file of most organizations where individuals are motivated to transform into business process experts. Questions about what they should do are beginning to come from these individuals and from their leaders alike. Now, we also find other thinkers and practitioners beginning to call for recognizing the importance of giving business process its due place. For example, in this same Fall 2008 issue of the SAP NetWeaver Magazine I find it encouraging that a fellow columnist, in discussing the need for an organization to embark on its Enterprise Architecture journey, concludes that this will likely have to start “with new emphasis on business process definition and organizational support ” (The Enterprise Architecture Journey Starts Now by Adolf Allesch); this is a position that essentially agrees with my premise about the primacy of business processes. Yet again, within the cover story of this same issue (7 Best Practices You Can Put in Place Now to Make Your Future Upgrade a Breeze by Evan J. Albright) there is a clear example of how IT/business assimilation is an important success factor (also raised in this forum through an earlier post, “Café Innovation – Going beyond IT-Business alignment and integration” on April 6, 2008). These are just two examples of this thought pattern beginning to take hold. It is now the turn of senior leaders within every organization that seeks success with SOA to consider this seriously, for this can make the difference between merely upgrading your technology landscape, versus giving yourself a platform from where you can launch the ability to benefit from executable process models and adapt dynamically to the demands of changing business models. As the column, “SOA Success: The Role of Senior Management in Establishing a Business Process Enterprise” states, “the onus is on senior management to articulate the case for change and to support the organization through the necessary shifts that this significant transformation involves.”
I invite you to read the above-referenced article, and join the discussion here. Tell us what your senior leadership has contemplated on this front? What are some definitive initiatives they have undertaken to provide permanent primacy to business processes?
P.S. The SAP NetWeaver Magazine is available online at: http://www.netweavermagazine.com/
– Puneet Suppal [Enterprise SOA Solutions & Innovation Capgemini]