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SOA Needs Agility BPM™

SOA is an architectural style for developing distributed systems. It enables loose coupling of services and flexibility. It allows for services to be modified with no impact on the consumer. Services support reuse, and can help preserve and extend the value stored in legacy systems by making their capabilities more widely available.

SOA is a great way to make IT more responsive in development, but it is fundamentally an internal tactical IT initiative. As a result, pure SOA approaches often fail to deliver value, as they lack connection to current business needs.

Agility BPM™ on the other hand provides the bridge between business goals and IT solutions. It provides a platform for directly implementing the services provided by the SOA Team into the strategic business processes in terms that business users understand. The business process consists of a sequence of tasks, some automated and others performed by people. Agility BPM™ allows for modeling, simulation, execution, monitoring and most importantly, continuous process improvement. It brings together and coordinates the activities and decision making of people with the systems' data and transaction services.

SOA is clearly the best current architecture for execution of the services that interface with external resources. The role of Agility BPM™ is to coordinate and monitor the execution of the entire process, including the individual tasks. This is necessary in order to keep your systems from becoming just another monolithic application.

More information about Agility BPM™ is available at http://www.qat-gen.com/agilitybpm.shtml.