Terry Schurter of BPMG has a great article yesterday on IT-Analysis.com about using a BPMS as the core of your SOA. His take on the current craze of SOA as a standalone big budget item:
Granted, I may be flying in the face of a storm of pundits, analysts, and technology gurus that endorse, promote and make great claims regarding the value SOA will deliver as I expose the seamy underside of this wolf in sheep’s clothing but hey — they’ve been wrong before — and the hard facts of the matter are that SOA expenditures will in many cases push important expenditures onto the backburner while they fiercely consume limited resources on a one way track to zero ROI.
I met Terry at the BPMG conference in London in May, and he definitely tells it like it is. I think that he’s just stirring the hornet nest here to see what happens, but he has some valid points about how a competent BPMS already does a lot of what you may be reinventing with your SOA initiative.
Interestingly, this post on Six Sigma Technologies’ site this week went through a checklist of SOA uses and benefits that sounds an awful lot like BPM…