There's a new front developing in the war between business and IT. Let's call it BPM (Business Process Management) versus SOA (Service Oriented Architecture).

To understand the point of conflict clearly, however, requires a look back at history.

You can go back as far as you want, but I think everything before the business process reengineering craze of the late 80s, early 90s should be considered prehistory. Here's why: The reengineering craze was the awakening of the business to the fact that their ways of doing things were buried inside functional computer systems that they didn't control.

Like many revolutionary concepts, however, reengineering had limited practical value. You can draw as many process diagrams as you want--and the consulting industry made millions leading these futile exercises in conference rooms all over the world--but if those diagrams don't address the complexity of accessing business and data logic in all those computer systems, you're not going to get anywhere.

These moribund reengineering efforts established the battle line that still exists today: "We could be a lot more efficient as a business today if we had systems that adequately supported the ways we want to do business and that could change when our business realities--and processes--needed to change. We should be able to take all those process diagrams we drew in those conference rooms and have our systems support them. Isn't that what IT is for?"

The biggest flaw in the reengineering concept (there were many) was that it was completely manual. You don't go after IT systems with a pen and paper. It wasn't so much that the business was completely naïve--after all, a pen and paper work fine when you're redesigning workflows on an automobile assembly line. Six Sigma and other process perfection efforts led to real productivity gains and quality improvements in manufacturing processes.

But Six Sigma hit a brick wall when functional computer systems appeared on the horizon. The black belts chopped madly at the blocks of big iron and came away with nothing but sore hands.  

Frustration with this inability to link process change with systems change--along with the hysteria around Y2K--led to the next major conflict: enterprise software. CEOs reasoned that if they couldn't change processes with pen and paper, they'd use the canned processes inside ERP systems to do it. I've discussed this era in detail elsewhere in the blog. Suffice it to say that this approach worked in some companies and industries--mostly highly automated, centralized operations that had little variation in processes to begin with. But in many other companies and industries, it simply led to more frustration and resentment towards IT among business people.

IT's defense has been standardization and enterprise architecture. Both have been ineffective because they wind up being navel gazing exercises. Rationalizing the IT architecture, while certainly important, doesn't address the fundamental war cry of the business: We want to control and change our processes ourselves!

But then last week I realized that the new front in this process war is aligning behind two technology concepts: BPM and SOA. I spoke at Shared Insight's BPM conference last week in Phoenix and saw that the veterans of the business reengineering battle have ditched the pen and paper and adopted BPM as their weapon of choice in gaining control of processes--process mapping and workflow are the core legacies of these tools. Most of the people at the conference were either business people or IT analysts who work directly with the business.

Meanwhile, when I go to IT conferences, SOA is all people talk about. SOA is the way that IT will enable the business to change its processes. But of course, SOA almost completely focuses on IT and integration rather than process. It is the latest, best incarnation of the enterprise architecture efforts we've seen in IT for years.

But now that both sides have a technology weapon, I'm more hopeful than I have been in a long time. That's because for better or worse, the only advancements that have been made in enterprise process change (with emphasis on the enterprise part) have been technology based. The internet, integration middleware and enterprise software, for all their flaws, have built more cross-functional sharing of business processes than any six sigma process redesign effort. IT is better equipped and more motivated to support enterprise sharing than business people. A controversial assertion, I know, but research has shown that IT has had a more long-lasting effect on enterprise sharing than any of those organizational realignments that the business side tries every few years. There's just too much politics and competitiveness among business leaders and business units--as perhaps there should be--to build enterprise cooperation unless it is supported by IT.

So why am I hopeful about BPM and SOA? I know that they are buzzwords, but they both mean revenue for IT vendors and consultants and the pools of money grouped around those two buzzwords are converging. Traditional integration middleware vendors (the big moneymakers in SOA) are beginning to add BPM tools to their fold and BPM vendors are diving down into the IT infrastructure through acquisitions and alliances.

The point is, however you want to link process change with systems change is fine with me. Just do it. Do it top down though BPM or bottom up through SOA. The business people at the conference seemed to think that BPM allows them to maintain their control over business process without throwing it over the wall to IT. Great. Wonderful. Takes away the powerless feeling they have with IT. Of course, I hear that BPM tools don't really have the power to link changeable process pictures with actual systems change at a deep level for major transactional processes yet. Likewise, SOA hasn't had much emphasis above the IT integration level yet.

But if the tools converge, the convergence could force the business and IT to finally address the core of the process conflict. An armistice could finally be at hand in the process wars. I know, I know, tools don't substitute for leadership and alignment and all that, but if you look back at the last 20 years, the tools have made more of a difference than the humans. As one conference attendee said to me, "The business has BPM and IT has SOA. But at least they both connect in some way to process."

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